> "... Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous."
I think of bottles as being like filter bubbles: once one is aware filter bubbles exist, it's possible to play with moving them around. Once one is aware of the bottle and how the bottling process works, it's possible to attempt to play with it as well.
> "When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!"
> What I’ve come to appreciate in the years since is that the stories portrayed were not exactly value neutral. Television, like all forms of fiction, contains implicit messages about how to be a good person and what sort of aims are worth pursuing.
This is very, very, very true. A screenwriting teacher of mine once explained to me that the vast majority of us no longer get our "sermons" from church. We get them from sitcoms.
Sitcoms aren't just joke-delivery vehicles or advertising conduits (though they're those, too). They're actually the primary place the majority of Americans learn about how to be a good person.
It may sound like a bizarre claim at first, but pretty much every sitcom follows a plot something along the lines of: character has bad idea, character debates whether to do it, character does bad idea, idea seems to succeed at first, idea ultimately fails miserably, character is in trouble, character gets bailed out by someone who loves them, character learns their lesson. Virtually every sitcom episode demonstrates a moral lesson in their A-plot. (B plots and C plots are more often just gags though.)
Given the amount of TV most Americans watch, we learn far more "lessons" in any given week or month than we have the opportunity to do so in real life or through friends.
Sitcom writers actually hold a tremendous place of responsibility in American society that they can use (and have used) for good. As the article notes, Will & Grace was a big factor in changing Americans' attitudes towards gay people. Just like the Cosby show was for attitudes towards Black families. So you might think sitcoms are dumb... but they're a huge part of people's moral education, most of all when watching them as kids and teenagers.
This is something the right has been complaining about for a long time, the shift of this moral authority from its traditional stewards (usually the churches) to the television writer.
It’s unclear to me how much of the complaint has to do with disliking the results, especially around the acceptance of homosexuality, and how much of it is a complaint about the shift in power itself. As you said, a lot of the moral lessons in sitcoms are fairly benign, as they usually center around the idea that bad actions have consequences but forgiveness and salvation is available if you ask for it. THe core message isn’t that different than what you’d see in some sermons, only the jokes are new.
Every time a pastor has a personal scandal or other personal problem, especially the mega-church pastors, it becomes fodder for media exploitation.
Do television writers, producers, and actors get the same public proctology exam? Rarely. But it does happen. The college admissions scandal and Harvey Weinstein come to mind.
But in general the moral authority is now an industry that self monitors its moral rectitude.
Well, TV writers are paid peanuts next to mega-church pastors, so there's less scope for charges of hypocrisy. Also scripts are generally developed by a room of writers, not any single one.
But the reality is that it is monitored, but certainly not self-monitored -- it's monitored by advertisers. If an pilot or episode isn't acceptable, advertisers will yank their money in a heartbeat.
This is why mostly all sitcoms preach a "conventional" middle-class morality, because that's specifically what advertisers find palatable. It's also why the first dark/shocking drama on TV -- The Sopranos -- was only possible on a network that was subscriber-supported instead of advertiser-supported, namely HBO.
Frankly sitcoms are a dying breed. They used to be middle of the road morally. To the extent they still are, it's because of reruns.
And I think you overstate a bit besides. Most shows after the 80s were explorations of stepping outside of the typical atomic WASP family like the Cleavers. Even the Brady Bunch was a blended family. But Mork and Mindy and Third Rock from the Sun come to mind as examples of throwing the script right out the window. Sally from Third Rock consistently grappled with gender identity issues, for instance.
You don't even have to go that far. The writer and leading creative force of one of the two shows in question (Aaron Sorkin) was forced out after getting busted for weed and shrooms at the Burbank airport.
Actors (probably the closest equivalent to mega-church pastors really) get this sort of treatment all the time, and have been subjected to trials in the court of public opinion for as long as they have been the subject of public adulation.
Pastors explicitly preach about morality. TV writers and producers make TV shows. Those happen to influence the boundaries of public opinion, but they don't explicitly profess to be experts on moral behaviour
What a sitcom teaches almost never comes from the "moral" of a plot or subplot, but what it treats as benign and acceptable or what it consistently mocks in the background.
For instance, in The Office, a character flashing her breasts, blurred out mind you, is outrageous enough to be laughable but not outrageous enough for the actress to avoid doing so in front of the production crew making the show. That communicates a lot and shifts the overton window.
Or it may be the subtle mockery of the values of a kind of person by making the person who holds such values into a comical buffoon or disgusting character. For instance, Angela is a "devout Christian" but is written to be a flaming hypocrite, and as the only representative of a Christian on the show suggests that is what all Christians are.
It doesn’t bode well for society if kids and teenagers are spending more and more time watching YouTube videos and Twitch streamers compared to scripted shows, then.
To that end “Unboxing” and “review” videos seem to have already had their impact.
It probably will make me an old man in the eyes of some portion of the following generation but there’s only so much that I can take of watching a person celebrate opening yet more free shit and yelling and swearing through an inanimate box at people they don’t know.
It’s not all bad, but by I swear there are more “product review” channels than ever and they’re spreading like dandelions.
Most of the time I don’t. Since many shops are closed to anything but appointments in the music world I’ve relied on hearing some shared equipment demos and experiences which the recommendation algorithm promptly sees fit to take as suggestion that I love just watching product videos and unboxings so they regularly show up next in my queue and begin to play before I can get to preventing it.
I’m also of a curious persuasion so I’ll stick it out for a while wondering what people find so fascinating—maybe that I was missing something. But I wasn’t, not so far as I’ve been able to tell yet.
If a majority of what children take in from something as powerful as the immense capacity for information sharing as the internet is watching someone open a material item they covet over and over again I don’t think that it can possibly be healthy for them in the long term—especially with a lack of other contextual framing.
Is there a list of common story lines somewhere? I used to watch sitcoms as a kid, so my memory needs to stretch back a bit, but that seems to sum up almost any episode that I can think of.
I've heard something along the lines of "there are only 6 types of plots and every movie is just a rehash of one of them", but I've never actually found the list.
I don't think so. It's just the lessons were through bad examples. George wouldn't let something go. Jerry would be an overly critical boyfriend. Kramer would reject good advice. All of them lied, gossiped, and snarked about their social circles constantly.
Yeah, the show literally ends with the four of them in jail due to their moral failings. They are anti-heros that serve as a counterexample to acceptable behavior.
I wouldn't add either the British or the American "The Office" to that list. Just think of the relationship between Jim and Pam in the American version, there are clear moral lessons there.
In my mind I've decided that those two are the negative characters, as in "this is what you people should do/be like", while the rest of the characters I find way more truer to life.
> Given the amount of TV most Americans watch, we learn far more "lessons" in any given week or month than we have the opportunity to do so in real life or through friends.
Some of the things learned may not be entirely accurate:
> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is the phenomenon in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement.[1] Copaganda has been defined by cultural critics in the United States as "media efforts to flatter police officers and spare them from skeptical coverage,"[2] "pieces of media that are so scarily disconnected from the reality of cops that they end up serving as offbeat recruitment ads,"[3] and "videos, photos, and news clips of police officers dancing, praying, or handing out free food" used to boost public relations.[1]
In the modern era there are quite a few sermon podcasts, which is handy if the local pastor(s) aren't skilled in that particular area. Just have to be careful about entering an echo chamber of too-like minded voices.
Yes, but even with that, shows are responding. Shows grow together with society.
After Black Lives Matter protests this summer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine cancelled already-written scripts when they realized, essentially, that they were unwittingly part of this "copaganda", and that they need to start over [1]:
> “We’re all in touch and kind of discussing how you make a comedy show about police right now, and if we can find a way of doing that so we all feel morally okay about.”
Because the show being "morally okay" is a responsibility they actually take quite seriously. (Remember, co-creator Mike Schur also created The Good Place, a hit sitcom about morality itself.)
There is something subtler and more important concealed in sitcoms and dramas. Narrative has its own logic. By that I mean that there are kinds of things that are easy to describe in certain media and difficult or impossible to describe in others. And also that the systematic requirements of storytelling satisfaction act to prioritise certain kinds of understandings of the world.
One simple but ill understood way in which this is true is in the numbers of people interacting within a group or institution. In drama the audience can keep in mind only a set number of major actors - even in a relatively complex political procedural, at most a dozen characters will recur. In reality, the humblest institution may have dozens or hundreds of regularly interacting people who take active part in decision making. So the implicit and unintended myth created by all films and television diminishes the importance of the collective - with its web of loyalties and contrasting intentions - and replaces it with a tiny number of easily tracked isolates. Character motivations always need to be personalised in drama, with 'complex' motivation existing to humanise rather than explicate action.
There are countless other examples of the ways drama systematically distorts our understanding of life and politics. From the disavowal of the motivating force ideology and (even in the United States) religion, to the systematic concealment of poverty.
None of these necessarily require censorship or explicit manipulation. They're not simply expressions of a particular societies blindness to its own flaws. But exemplars of what can easily be transmitted in drama.
This is a great insight. I think it's also worth mentioning that TV is an imperfect representation of our moral reality. TV shows are primarily meant to entertain and keep us watching. Their budgets, production and writing are often slapdash. The shows are absolutely packed with value judgements, though often the creators are not fully in control of the message and the lessons are either contradictory or downright fantastical.
We are the TV people. As I get older I realize more and more that TV raised everybody. I watch us act out the screen dramas in our real lives. I learned professional etiquette from office dramas and sitcoms, and so did everyone else. I re-watched TNG recently and realized it's not a show about aliens on military spaceships, it's a show about people from the late 80's and early 90's aspiring to a better and more inclusive office culture filled with universally competent co-workers who do not harass each other. It is a vision of a world that will never exist.
The author of the article maybe has it all a bit confused. He is not binging on prestige TV to learn more about his upper class peers. His upper class peers learned to be themselves by binging on prestige TV. He had gone right to the source. Jean Baudrillard would agree. Life imitates art imitating art and so on.
This mimetic dynamic is exactly why I believe Brave New World and 1984 both have more to say about the large changes in anglophone society between 1910 and 1930 than an orthodox facile dismissal as science fiction dystopias would lead one to believe.
(my hobby: guessing not when costume dramas are set, but when they were shot.)
I'm no authority, but as far as it goes the author probably encountered plenty of actual upper class americans at ivy league schools. I was inspired to watch a few episodes of the West Wing to see if I could sus out what he was talking about. I could pretty easily tell that Aaron Sorkin wrote it from a middle class perspective that fetishized and idealized wealth, education and power that he did not himself possess. I can see why ivy leaguers would like it, since it flatters them at every chance.
My English education as a Swedish kid mostly consisted of watching shows on Cartoon Network. People always think it's a joke when I offer Hanna-Barbera cartoons as the explanation for why I speak English with a North American accent. They just assume I studied in the US or Canada, or grew up there.
Not gonna lie – most things I know I probably learned from watching TV shows, movies, and more recently YouTube videos.
Americans typically assume I'm from somewhere in the Midwest but can't quite place where, and when I say I'm not
American they assume I'm Canadian. It's usually a bit of back and forth before they believe that I'm actually Swedish, and sometimes I have to bust out the börk börk as proof – it's a lot of fun! :o)
Mange tak. I was more interested in the other direction: were there any situations where you'd been surprised by americans behaving other than how you'd been led to believe by their media?
(I'd been told the literal börk börk is a false attribution, and that he sounds more like a norwegian chef. Or at least a danish chef trying to sing with a mouth full of potato?)
I would say the only time I've been surprised by media's portrayal of people in the US is when I've visited Florida – turns out Florida man isn't just a stereotype after all!
Joking aside, I think I've traveled enough and met enough people from all over the world that if I ever did let my opinion of people be (overly) prejudiced by what I saw in various media it was probably so long ago that I can't recall. I try to keep as open a mind as I can.
So, no, I don't really recall any time stateside that I've been surprised that people were different from their media portrayal. But I will say this, as a European I often hear people say that Americans are ignorant gun toting maniacs, and it makes me sad. The US is vast, incredibly diverse, and while I certainly have met an ignorant person or two along the way I'd say the majority of people I've met are fine people just trying to go about their business – pretty much like it is everywhere else. Maybe it helps that I don't follow the news very much.
We may speak different languages, eat different foods and watch different shows, but my firm belief is that at the end of the day if we're all pretty similar after all.
at the end of the day we're all pretty similar after all.
I had had some hopes that TikTok might succeed where Youtube has apparently failed in making this point obvious to even the most casual observer, but it appears to be, for some, conceptus non grata.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.
The Swedish chef doesn't really sound like he's from anywhere in Scandinavia to be honest, while perhaps somehow from all over Scandinavia. Kinda like a mix of all Scandinavian peoples.
"Mange tack" sounds more like danish than Swedish, where you'd say "stort tack" or "tack så mycket" instead. :o)
> character has bad idea [...] learns their lesson [...] Sitcom writers actually hold a tremendous place of responsibility in American society
Seemingly not widely known, is that sitcom scripts were for years often submitted to the office of the White House Drug Czar, for approval and negotiated revision. IIRC, the carrot was the show counting towards a station's public service broadcast time requirements? So a "90210" script containing drug use for instance, might be revised to reflect a list of requests, intended to present it more clearly as bad idea.
As we now collectively design a censorship regime for more recent social tech, it might be interesting to see insightful non-narrow analysis of past regimes.
Went looking for the mentioned book "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System", which is a few decades old, and found this Atlantic retrospective [0] that had a few more interesting recent thoughts on the matter and a few more books to read.
It's actually much deeper and more insidious than this.
These kinds of shows and movies that you grew up watching provide the character and narrative archetypes that you act out in your own life. This affects every aspect of your life. You are basing your emotional responses and behaviors and making life choices based off whatever ideas and values had currency among a small group of animators/story writers/producers/etc that were active during your childhood.
I remember coming to this realization many years ago (I'm 28 now). I would sometimes catch myself actively conceptualizing a particular movie/tv character in trying to understand how to behave or conceptualize a certain situation I was in.
Since then I have done a deep dive into the Western canon including history, philosophy, psychology, and religion. From engaging with all of that I have basically purged these contemporary archetypes and narratives and replaced them with traditional, more grounded ones (e.g. from Fresh Prince of Bel Air to Julius Caesar, from the History Channel to Herodotus).
It's akin to replacing a life long diet of gas station junk food with fresh organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. Since then I have gained an immeasurable sense of equanimity and inner calm. Now when I call upon these archetypes to understand the world and how I should feel and respond to it, I am engaging with things which have roots that go very deep.
The book that fully crystalized this for me were the books by Nassim Taleb (his Incerto series). These books completely and utterly changed my life.
If you read the descriptions it may not seem directly related to what I'm talking about but he gives you a complete and fully articulated intellectual framework for understanding the pitfalls of modernity and also as importantly in explaining his ideas he references ancient authors, bits of history and mythology.
Those references will give you a good idea of the depth and breadth of what's there and you can choose from among those where you want to dive deeper.
Wow thank you for sharing. This is such beautiful prose and such a wonderful articulation of my beliefs. I fully identify with every word of this. I will be sharing this with a bunch of my like-minded friends.
He has quite a few other articles, perhaps not quite as good as that one but the same style - I'd say this guy has a very special skill that you don't see too often.
I'd go so far as to say that the ideas in that post, and the manner in which they're presented, is getting pretty deep into subversive propaganda territory, but in a good way.
Absolutely, this is basically neo-reactionary kind of stuff but from a deep metaphysical perspective. Another author worth checking out is Curtis Yarvin who is much more focused on material/realpolitik concerns.
He also has a substack but the focus is much more narrow than what you get in these interviews. It's intended to be a modern version of The Prince: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Leaving aside the hyperbole, propaganda and delusion, there's some interesting tidbits...
> Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”
> “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.
> “Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
If true, that's quite interesting.
> Yarvin believes there is no such thing as democracy—and Thiel has said as much, as well. Yarvin’s stunted political imagination prizes strict hierarchies—despotisms, monarchies, and experimental new feudalism via a “patchwork” of corporate fiefdoms managed by absolute dictators who might be appointed by a vote of property-owning “shareholders.” Unlike some advocates of Silicon Valley secessionism, Yarvin has never been shy in acknowledging that this amounts to a revolution and would require the forcible overthrow of the established order. He advised, for instance, that the new dictator of California should throw the old elected governor in Alcatraz, and then briskly proceed to pack the government with Google guys.
> It’s worth considering that Thiel is not just another wealthy Trump adviser. He is a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the Homeland Security Department, through his Big Data surveillance startup, Palantir. (The name is a Lord of the Rings reference; like many big race theorists in Silicon Valley Thiel and Yarvin adore J.R.R. Tolkien, which can be read as an epic glorification of a winner-take-all race war. Tolkien’s trilogy also conveniently doubles as a regressive fantasy universe where heroic Nordic souls either gain power by force or come into it via birthright—in both scenarios, a lineage that leaves them untroubled by the irksome niceties of democratic procedure.)
This seems like quite a counter-intuitive situation - very strange bedfellows. I'd think they'd all be aware of it, and also aware that each other are aware of it.
I really enjoy listening to Thiel. I think I've watched every interview with him I could find on Youtube.
He's actually very deep into the metaphysical stuff, in particular he has a deep understanding of Christianity. This is my favorite interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_00POR-Po
Yarvin is a much deeper thinker than what those quotes would suggest. He's very much focused on the nature of power and he's extremely well-read. Every time I watch a new interview with him I end up buying another book or two. I recently finished The Machiavellians by James Burnham which is the book he always recommends people read. Yarvin actually invented the terms "redpill" and "bluepill" interestingly.
As far as Nick Land goes, I will check him out. I see that he tends to be associated with Yarvin so I am surprised I've never heard of him. I tend to view "scientific racism" (and when I use that term I assign no moral weight to it) as a trap. On a purely rational level I can understand the logic behind the ideas but when you introduce the irrational dimension (e.g. the Imago Dei for starters) it becomes a lot harder to defend. Thomas Sowell actually does a good job delegitimizing many aspects of that approach on a rational level in his studies that compare wealth and income within racial groups but across cultures (e.g. Chinese within China vs Chinese in Southeast Asia or even American blacks in the 1940s vs American blacks today). Nassim Taleb has argued very forcefully that the idea of IQ is complete pseudoscience.
But yes, any person that the Cathedral (a term from Yarvin) goes after is someone at least worth looking into.
Compared to what passes for intellectualism nowadays (especially from those running the show, or at least advertised as doing so), this guy seems like he's not just on a different level, but from a completely different dimension. I don't agree with the final conclusions he draws, or at least my take on what they are, but he sure understands how the current system works.
Putting these ideas into a form the average Joe could understand (and be persuaded by) might be a tall order though, I imagine he's considered that but I'll have to hunt around to see if he's ever written anything on it.
Yes, these are the people I look for. These are people that give you entirely new dimensions of analysis with which to understand the world.
I'm also not sold on all his conclusions but that's pretty common for me when it comes to truly great thinkers. For example with Nietzsche that for me has been the single greatest argument for the significance and value of Judeo-Christian morality yet his program was to destroy that.
> I imagine he's considered that
If you get deeper into his stuff you'll see that he's not at all, in fact quite the opposite.
I highly recommend watching his interviews on YouTube. There's only like 7 or 8 of them but you get different perspectives given the particular background of the interviewer.
> If you get deeper into his stuff you'll see that he's not at all, in fact quite the opposite.
Meaning, he has no plan for simplification, and maybe even not only that, but he doesn't believe the common man can understand these ideas? (If so, I'm curious how he plans to launch his new world order scheme.)
I was watching this Michael Malice fellow on Lex Fridman the other day - very intelligent guy, knows his stuff (that which is in his bubble) very well, and he is very strongly of the opinion that not only can the common man not think currently, but that they are incapable of it at all.
Now, it is possible that this is the case of course, but forming strong conclusions about something for which there is literally no data (teaching thinking has not been attempted in any serious way) demonstrates a significant gap in one's intelligence. Although, about 90%+ of the population suffers from this (take the HN hivemind on political topics for example), so I guess one shouldn't be too hard on him.
I actually watched that Michael Malice interview the other day too. I disagree with him on that particular idea that people are divided so permanently into these classes of people. I definitely used to be a normie liberal/progressive with many of those associated pathologies but I've always been very independent minded.
This is a very common idea though, closely associated with the idea of the importance of heredity. It's such a common idea (think of the emphasis on genealogies in the Bible) that I can't fully discount it.
Not OP, but The Harvard Classics is a good enough place to start. One of the things that made the series so good was the 15-minute a day reading guide.
This site has .pdf copies of the books for free. You can sign up and pay for more content if you'd like, but the gist of it is free anyway. Here is page for the daily reading guide: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1
I'll caution that the book collection was published in 1909, so you'll be missing out on the last 111 years of history. Still, it's as good a place to start as any for a look at classical literature.
To be fair, Cesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War is masterclass writing and well worth the read. The way that he writes to three audiences at once is superb and the lessons he tries to impart are solid gold. It's a very rare and very useful look into the mind of one of the most famous people in history. Try to search for a good translation though.
I wonder if shows like that—which portray middle-class Americans living in unrealistic material luxury as aimless 20-somethings in NY—give people in other countries unrealistic perceptions of the American standard of living.
Forget people in other countries, those shows gave _their target audiences_ (young GenX and old Millennials, who mostly didn't live in NYC, when they were 15-27) unrealistic perceptions of the American standard of living.
The scale of the unreality of living like that in NYC didn't register for me until I moved there (with a much more lucrative job that still didn't make that lifestyle a reasonable decision).
> There is a well-known idea that liberal Hollywood indoctrinates audiences, leading them to change their values or beliefs.
The author spends half the article on what is essentially a left-wing fairy tale that posits the question, "If the Democrats had political rhetoric even half as effective as the Republicans , what might it sound like?" Putting that show in the context of "liberal indoctrination" is like writing an entire article on Bolero and then stating, "A lot of people find Ravel's music blustery and repetitive."
I also love how the author uses ambiguity to hedge in that sentence. E.g., change how? Say I give the example of Zero Dark Thirty repeating the right-wing propaganda of its former-CIA consultants to rationalize the CIA torture regime so a lot of powerful people can continue evading jail time. I go on to explain that this is par for the course for the modern Hollywood U.S. war movie with very few exceptions. Well, the author never said the indoctrination was toward liberal values-- they only implied it was effective in changing ideas and values. So now they can freely pivot to one of a number of potentially contradictory positions at will (military movies are an exception, Hollywood liberal are only liberal in name, author doesn't actually believe the trope and was only using it as an example, Hollywood liberalism is uncritical and therefore subject to exploitation from other powerful propagandists like the Pentagon/China, etc.).
In light of that it is worth noting-- especially on HN-- that there is writing in the humanities that doesn't merely "ask questions," but also does research, provides evidence, and takes a stance based on that evidence. This isn't an example of that.
> [West Wing] tested “extremely well” with certain audience segments. Among them: households that earned more than $75,000 a year, households with at least one college graduate and households that subscribed to The New York Times.
Ah: white, liberal households.
I’m the first to say that not everything should be about politics, but I’ve always strongly associated that show with the left. I’ve never heard a conservative reference it at all.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty transparent attempt to let readers of the NYT feel good about themselves.
The West Wing is definitely an idealized version of 00’s-era Democrat politics. I think largely because Democrats envision their ideal government and presidency as a bunch of clever, earnest staffers running around outsmarting everyone else.
Conservatives during the 00’s more strongly identified with 24, a universe where politicians and bureaucrats were sometimes virtuous, sometimes corrupt, and sometimes evil, but the hero was Jack Bauer, one of the rough men who stands ready to do violence on our behalf as we sleep soundly in our beds, usually in a very literal sense.
On the other hand, Don Camillo was a post-war italian priest who was always at odds with the post-war communist mayor, but by the end of every story they've managed to work together to do what's right for their village.
President Obama, was a fan of the show "Homeland", created by the makers of 24. The plot of homeland concerns a stereotypical arab terrorist organization infiltrating the US government and the cia's attempts to stop it. I hardly think it is fair to say that this is a "conservative" phenomenon. Members of both political parties seem have a fetish for watching federal law enforcement rough up stereotypical hollywood terrorists.
If you've not read it: good, keep your life that way. For the people out there that have: I'm sorry.
The 'plot' is akin to 24, in that there is a good guy that kill bad guys. But the writing style, the aggressive use of exposition, the terrible dialog, and the total lack of logic in scene construction make the book just terrible. The part where the protagonist blinks out the message "Airstrike now. 35 41 46 N / 51 25 23 E" (the coordinates for Tehran) is comically unrealistic. If you actually put that into morse code you get : .- .. .-. ... - .-. .. -.- . / -. --- .-- .-.-.- / ...-- ..... / ....- .---- / ....- -.... / -. / -..-. / ..... .---- / ..--- ..... / ..--- ...-- / . You try blinking that out.
I've no idea who his editor was or who his ghostwriter is, but good Lord, Ben really needs to get better at spotting grifters. That book is hot garbage.
Interestingly I tried to blink that out and ran into a problem: how do I represent a pause or break with blinking? This made me wonder how it would be done with other Morse code transmitters, and though I haven't yet looked it up anywhere it seems to me that Morse code might not be the binary I always assumed it was, but more trinary: dot, dash, break. Something I will look into more now, thanks.
Well, I'm only a couple of seasons in, love it, and am a conservative (although I do fall into all the other categories). Clever dialog, entertaining, etc.
Interesting how West Wing comes up in this because Sorkins emphasis on educational prestige in Newsroom, Social Network and to a lesser extent Molly’s Game is what made me incredibly sad to graduate from a state school!
It is true that when you graduate from a prestigious university, society at large has a superficial notion of your competence/abilities at the outset, but in the long term, i think what you actually do as an individual defines you. There are tons of people who graduated from a great school xyz whose only real accomplishment is graduating from xyz. Do not let labels define what you can do with your life, once you buy into that game, you are mentally boomed for the rest of your life. Einstein certainly never said "oh i work at a patent office, which must mean i can't become a world class physicist", no one (or institution) owns creativity, knowledge, passion or drive, and those are the most important qualities that drive the world.
Nobody is perceiving you to be lesser, nobody is perceiving you at all for the most part, that would be true even if you went to Harvard. From your comments you said you went to NC state, i remember that one of the founders of cockroachdb also went there, it certainly didn't stop him from doing great things. What i do know for a fact, is that your negative, self pitying approach to life will do you much much more harm than where you work or where u went to school, and i suggest you reflect hard on that or get professional help.
Yeah, but the CockroachDB guy (Ben Darnell, really impressive guy) was a full scholarship student which I wasn't and joined Google early which I didn't, so it's hard to draw any hopeful comparisons there.
But why would being able to draw comparison with the guy even be helpful? You won't suddenly turn into him. At the end of the day, you went to a relatively good school, work at a good company, what you can or cannot achieve going forward will be solely dictated by your merit. If your problem is that you feel that your abilities are not aligned with your goals in life, then you can either revise your goals or set yourself up for a lifetime of misery.
A nice read, and I'm very happy to see the author progress from foster homes to the military to academia and finally to the brink of a PhD.
But if the author thinks reading the NYT, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic is the way of "Elite" America, I disagree. It's a microcosm of a bubble, and that's no way to be elite about anything real.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadThis is a question that keeps coming back to me and I still don't know the answer. And maybe I'll never will.
I think of bottles as being like filter bubbles: once one is aware filter bubbles exist, it's possible to play with moving them around. Once one is aware of the bottle and how the bottling process works, it's possible to attempt to play with it as well.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24141469
Or juxtapose http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
> "it is clear that none of the moral virtues formed is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit."
with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867639
> "When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!"
This is very, very, very true. A screenwriting teacher of mine once explained to me that the vast majority of us no longer get our "sermons" from church. We get them from sitcoms.
Sitcoms aren't just joke-delivery vehicles or advertising conduits (though they're those, too). They're actually the primary place the majority of Americans learn about how to be a good person.
It may sound like a bizarre claim at first, but pretty much every sitcom follows a plot something along the lines of: character has bad idea, character debates whether to do it, character does bad idea, idea seems to succeed at first, idea ultimately fails miserably, character is in trouble, character gets bailed out by someone who loves them, character learns their lesson. Virtually every sitcom episode demonstrates a moral lesson in their A-plot. (B plots and C plots are more often just gags though.)
Given the amount of TV most Americans watch, we learn far more "lessons" in any given week or month than we have the opportunity to do so in real life or through friends.
Sitcom writers actually hold a tremendous place of responsibility in American society that they can use (and have used) for good. As the article notes, Will & Grace was a big factor in changing Americans' attitudes towards gay people. Just like the Cosby show was for attitudes towards Black families. So you might think sitcoms are dumb... but they're a huge part of people's moral education, most of all when watching them as kids and teenagers.
It’s unclear to me how much of the complaint has to do with disliking the results, especially around the acceptance of homosexuality, and how much of it is a complaint about the shift in power itself. As you said, a lot of the moral lessons in sitcoms are fairly benign, as they usually center around the idea that bad actions have consequences but forgiveness and salvation is available if you ask for it. THe core message isn’t that different than what you’d see in some sermons, only the jokes are new.
Do television writers, producers, and actors get the same public proctology exam? Rarely. But it does happen. The college admissions scandal and Harvey Weinstein come to mind.
But in general the moral authority is now an industry that self monitors its moral rectitude.
But the reality is that it is monitored, but certainly not self-monitored -- it's monitored by advertisers. If an pilot or episode isn't acceptable, advertisers will yank their money in a heartbeat.
This is why mostly all sitcoms preach a "conventional" middle-class morality, because that's specifically what advertisers find palatable. It's also why the first dark/shocking drama on TV -- The Sopranos -- was only possible on a network that was subscriber-supported instead of advertiser-supported, namely HBO.
Well, how many "mega"-churches are there though? How many people congregate to them versus the local micro-/mini-church?
Also, just because a pastor is a hypocrite doesn't necessarily make them wrong:
* https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
A doctor who smokes, but tells you smoking is bad for your health, is a hypocrite but still medically correct. :)
> Also scripts are generally developed by a room of writers, not any single one.
Usually in the US: in the (e.g.) the UK each series/season is often done by an individual (or 2-3).
Frankly sitcoms are a dying breed. They used to be middle of the road morally. To the extent they still are, it's because of reruns.
And I think you overstate a bit besides. Most shows after the 80s were explorations of stepping outside of the typical atomic WASP family like the Cleavers. Even the Brady Bunch was a blended family. But Mork and Mindy and Third Rock from the Sun come to mind as examples of throwing the script right out the window. Sally from Third Rock consistently grappled with gender identity issues, for instance.
Actors (probably the closest equivalent to mega-church pastors really) get this sort of treatment all the time, and have been subjected to trials in the court of public opinion for as long as they have been the subject of public adulation.
For instance, in The Office, a character flashing her breasts, blurred out mind you, is outrageous enough to be laughable but not outrageous enough for the actress to avoid doing so in front of the production crew making the show. That communicates a lot and shifts the overton window.
Or it may be the subtle mockery of the values of a kind of person by making the person who holds such values into a comical buffoon or disgusting character. For instance, Angela is a "devout Christian" but is written to be a flaming hypocrite, and as the only representative of a Christian on the show suggests that is what all Christians are.
It probably will make me an old man in the eyes of some portion of the following generation but there’s only so much that I can take of watching a person celebrate opening yet more free shit and yelling and swearing through an inanimate box at people they don’t know.
It’s not all bad, but by I swear there are more “product review” channels than ever and they’re spreading like dandelions.
I’m also of a curious persuasion so I’ll stick it out for a while wondering what people find so fascinating—maybe that I was missing something. But I wasn’t, not so far as I’ve been able to tell yet.
If a majority of what children take in from something as powerful as the immense capacity for information sharing as the internet is watching someone open a material item they covet over and over again I don’t think that it can possibly be healthy for them in the long term—especially with a lack of other contextual framing.
I've heard something along the lines of "there are only 6 types of plots and every movie is just a rehash of one of them", but I've never actually found the list.
But be aware of the rabbit hole!
Seinfeld may be a major exception to this rule.
In my mind I've decided that those two are the negative characters, as in "this is what you people should do/be like", while the rest of the characters I find way more truer to life.
Some of the things learned may not be entirely accurate:
> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is the phenomenon in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement.[1] Copaganda has been defined by cultural critics in the United States as "media efforts to flatter police officers and spare them from skeptical coverage,"[2] "pieces of media that are so scarily disconnected from the reality of cops that they end up serving as offbeat recruitment ads,"[3] and "videos, photos, and news clips of police officers dancing, praying, or handing out free food" used to boost public relations.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
* https://boingboing.net/2020/10/07/what-is-copanganda-and-how...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhDawfCLHo
Yeah, but that's also very true of sermons at places of worship. That's speaking as someone who thinks an accurate sermon is possible.
After Black Lives Matter protests this summer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine cancelled already-written scripts when they realized, essentially, that they were unwittingly part of this "copaganda", and that they need to start over [1]:
> “We’re all in touch and kind of discussing how you make a comedy show about police right now, and if we can find a way of doing that so we all feel morally okay about.”
Because the show being "morally okay" is a responsibility they actually take quite seriously. (Remember, co-creator Mike Schur also created The Good Place, a hit sitcom about morality itself.)
[1] https://hypebeast.com/2020/7/brooklyn-nine-nine-andy-samberg...
One simple but ill understood way in which this is true is in the numbers of people interacting within a group or institution. In drama the audience can keep in mind only a set number of major actors - even in a relatively complex political procedural, at most a dozen characters will recur. In reality, the humblest institution may have dozens or hundreds of regularly interacting people who take active part in decision making. So the implicit and unintended myth created by all films and television diminishes the importance of the collective - with its web of loyalties and contrasting intentions - and replaces it with a tiny number of easily tracked isolates. Character motivations always need to be personalised in drama, with 'complex' motivation existing to humanise rather than explicate action.
There are countless other examples of the ways drama systematically distorts our understanding of life and politics. From the disavowal of the motivating force ideology and (even in the United States) religion, to the systematic concealment of poverty.
None of these necessarily require censorship or explicit manipulation. They're not simply expressions of a particular societies blindness to its own flaws. But exemplars of what can easily be transmitted in drama.
We are the TV people. As I get older I realize more and more that TV raised everybody. I watch us act out the screen dramas in our real lives. I learned professional etiquette from office dramas and sitcoms, and so did everyone else. I re-watched TNG recently and realized it's not a show about aliens on military spaceships, it's a show about people from the late 80's and early 90's aspiring to a better and more inclusive office culture filled with universally competent co-workers who do not harass each other. It is a vision of a world that will never exist.
The author of the article maybe has it all a bit confused. He is not binging on prestige TV to learn more about his upper class peers. His upper class peers learned to be themselves by binging on prestige TV. He had gone right to the source. Jean Baudrillard would agree. Life imitates art imitating art and so on.
(my hobby: guessing not when costume dramas are set, but when they were shot.)
Bonus branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect#/media/File:Dros...
Edit: as to whether "his upper class peers" are upper or not I will leave to those of you who are nearer to them to discuss.
Not gonna lie – most things I know I probably learned from watching TV shows, movies, and more recently YouTube videos.
(I'd been told the literal börk börk is a false attribution, and that he sounds more like a norwegian chef. Or at least a danish chef trying to sing with a mouth full of potato?)
I would say the only time I've been surprised by media's portrayal of people in the US is when I've visited Florida – turns out Florida man isn't just a stereotype after all!
Joking aside, I think I've traveled enough and met enough people from all over the world that if I ever did let my opinion of people be (overly) prejudiced by what I saw in various media it was probably so long ago that I can't recall. I try to keep as open a mind as I can.
So, no, I don't really recall any time stateside that I've been surprised that people were different from their media portrayal. But I will say this, as a European I often hear people say that Americans are ignorant gun toting maniacs, and it makes me sad. The US is vast, incredibly diverse, and while I certainly have met an ignorant person or two along the way I'd say the majority of people I've met are fine people just trying to go about their business – pretty much like it is everywhere else. Maybe it helps that I don't follow the news very much.
We may speak different languages, eat different foods and watch different shows, but my firm belief is that at the end of the day if we're all pretty similar after all.
I had had some hopes that TikTok might succeed where Youtube has apparently failed in making this point obvious to even the most casual observer, but it appears to be, for some, conceptus non grata.
Tack så mycket!"Mange tack" sounds more like danish than Swedish, where you'd say "stort tack" or "tack så mycket" instead. :o)
Seemingly not widely known, is that sitcom scripts were for years often submitted to the office of the White House Drug Czar, for approval and negotiated revision. IIRC, the carrot was the show counting towards a station's public service broadcast time requirements? So a "90210" script containing drug use for instance, might be revised to reflect a list of requests, intended to present it more clearly as bad idea.
As we now collectively design a censorship regime for more recent social tech, it might be interesting to see insightful non-narrow analysis of past regimes.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-d...
That said, although dated, I still recommend Fussel’s book — it’s hilarious if not informative.
Also, for an earlier transatlantic take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English#History
These kinds of shows and movies that you grew up watching provide the character and narrative archetypes that you act out in your own life. This affects every aspect of your life. You are basing your emotional responses and behaviors and making life choices based off whatever ideas and values had currency among a small group of animators/story writers/producers/etc that were active during your childhood.
I remember coming to this realization many years ago (I'm 28 now). I would sometimes catch myself actively conceptualizing a particular movie/tv character in trying to understand how to behave or conceptualize a certain situation I was in.
Since then I have done a deep dive into the Western canon including history, philosophy, psychology, and religion. From engaging with all of that I have basically purged these contemporary archetypes and narratives and replaced them with traditional, more grounded ones (e.g. from Fresh Prince of Bel Air to Julius Caesar, from the History Channel to Herodotus).
It's akin to replacing a life long diet of gas station junk food with fresh organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. Since then I have gained an immeasurable sense of equanimity and inner calm. Now when I call upon these archetypes to understand the world and how I should feel and respond to it, I am engaging with things which have roots that go very deep.
If you read the descriptions it may not seem directly related to what I'm talking about but he gives you a complete and fully articulated intellectual framework for understanding the pitfalls of modernity and also as importantly in explaining his ideas he references ancient authors, bits of history and mythology.
Those references will give you a good idea of the depth and breadth of what's there and you can choose from among those where you want to dive deeper.
In Praise of the Gods - What the Rationalistic World Forgot
https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-gods
https://simonsarris.substack.com/archive
I'd go so far as to say that the ideas in that post, and the manner in which they're presented, is getting pretty deep into subversive propaganda territory, but in a good way.
This is a good one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQO3VbJsMw
He also has a substack but the focus is much more narrow than what you get in these interviews. It's intended to be a modern version of The Prince: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Do you have an opinion on Peter Thiel? Like, in the big scheme / long run...do you think he's good, evil, chaotic neutral, other?
Googling, this came up:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein
Leaving aside the hyperbole, propaganda and delusion, there's some interesting tidbits...
> Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”
> “Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.
> “Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”
If true, that's quite interesting.
> Yarvin believes there is no such thing as democracy—and Thiel has said as much, as well. Yarvin’s stunted political imagination prizes strict hierarchies—despotisms, monarchies, and experimental new feudalism via a “patchwork” of corporate fiefdoms managed by absolute dictators who might be appointed by a vote of property-owning “shareholders.” Unlike some advocates of Silicon Valley secessionism, Yarvin has never been shy in acknowledging that this amounts to a revolution and would require the forcible overthrow of the established order. He advised, for instance, that the new dictator of California should throw the old elected governor in Alcatraz, and then briskly proceed to pack the government with Google guys.
> It’s worth considering that Thiel is not just another wealthy Trump adviser. He is a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the Homeland Security Department, through his Big Data surveillance startup, Palantir. (The name is a Lord of the Rings reference; like many big race theorists in Silicon Valley Thiel and Yarvin adore J.R.R. Tolkien, which can be read as an epic glorification of a winner-take-all race war. Tolkien’s trilogy also conveniently doubles as a regressive fantasy universe where heroic Nordic souls either gain power by force or come into it via birthright—in both scenarios, a lineage that leaves them untroubled by the irksome niceties of democratic procedure.)
This seems like quite a counter-intuitive situation - very strange bedfellows. I'd think they'd all be aware of it, and also aware that each other are aware of it.
And then there's also Nick Land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land
I think it's worth watching if the media machine ever goes after these relatively obscure people.
He's actually very deep into the metaphysical stuff, in particular he has a deep understanding of Christianity. This is my favorite interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_00POR-Po
Yarvin is a much deeper thinker than what those quotes would suggest. He's very much focused on the nature of power and he's extremely well-read. Every time I watch a new interview with him I end up buying another book or two. I recently finished The Machiavellians by James Burnham which is the book he always recommends people read. Yarvin actually invented the terms "redpill" and "bluepill" interestingly.
As far as Nick Land goes, I will check him out. I see that he tends to be associated with Yarvin so I am surprised I've never heard of him. I tend to view "scientific racism" (and when I use that term I assign no moral weight to it) as a trap. On a purely rational level I can understand the logic behind the ideas but when you introduce the irrational dimension (e.g. the Imago Dei for starters) it becomes a lot harder to defend. Thomas Sowell actually does a good job delegitimizing many aspects of that approach on a rational level in his studies that compare wealth and income within racial groups but across cultures (e.g. Chinese within China vs Chinese in Southeast Asia or even American blacks in the 1940s vs American blacks today). Nassim Taleb has argued very forcefully that the idea of IQ is complete pseudoscience.
But yes, any person that the Cathedral (a term from Yarvin) goes after is someone at least worth looking into.
Compared to what passes for intellectualism nowadays (especially from those running the show, or at least advertised as doing so), this guy seems like he's not just on a different level, but from a completely different dimension. I don't agree with the final conclusions he draws, or at least my take on what they are, but he sure understands how the current system works.
Putting these ideas into a form the average Joe could understand (and be persuaded by) might be a tall order though, I imagine he's considered that but I'll have to hunt around to see if he's ever written anything on it.
Yes, these are the people I look for. These are people that give you entirely new dimensions of analysis with which to understand the world.
I'm also not sold on all his conclusions but that's pretty common for me when it comes to truly great thinkers. For example with Nietzsche that for me has been the single greatest argument for the significance and value of Judeo-Christian morality yet his program was to destroy that.
> I imagine he's considered that
If you get deeper into his stuff you'll see that he's not at all, in fact quite the opposite.
I highly recommend watching his interviews on YouTube. There's only like 7 or 8 of them but you get different perspectives given the particular background of the interviewer.
Meaning, he has no plan for simplification, and maybe even not only that, but he doesn't believe the common man can understand these ideas? (If so, I'm curious how he plans to launch his new world order scheme.)
I was watching this Michael Malice fellow on Lex Fridman the other day - very intelligent guy, knows his stuff (that which is in his bubble) very well, and he is very strongly of the opinion that not only can the common man not think currently, but that they are incapable of it at all.
Now, it is possible that this is the case of course, but forming strong conclusions about something for which there is literally no data (teaching thinking has not been attempted in any serious way) demonstrates a significant gap in one's intelligence. Although, about 90%+ of the population suffers from this (take the HN hivemind on political topics for example), so I guess one shouldn't be too hard on him.
This is a very common idea though, closely associated with the idea of the importance of heredity. It's such a common idea (think of the emphasis on genealogies in the Bible) that I can't fully discount it.
Nothing wrong with that though (childish downvoting). Or outright lying. These are both completely acceptable actions here on HN.
But one better not comment on any of this behavior...oh no, that would be violating the HN Guidelines, and we shan't have that.
This site has .pdf copies of the books for free. You can sign up and pay for more content if you'd like, but the gist of it is free anyway. Here is page for the daily reading guide: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1
I'll caution that the book collection was published in 1909, so you'll be missing out on the last 111 years of history. Still, it's as good a place to start as any for a look at classical literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico
The scale of the unreality of living like that in NYC didn't register for me until I moved there (with a much more lucrative job that still didn't make that lifestyle a reasonable decision).
The author spends half the article on what is essentially a left-wing fairy tale that posits the question, "If the Democrats had political rhetoric even half as effective as the Republicans , what might it sound like?" Putting that show in the context of "liberal indoctrination" is like writing an entire article on Bolero and then stating, "A lot of people find Ravel's music blustery and repetitive."
I also love how the author uses ambiguity to hedge in that sentence. E.g., change how? Say I give the example of Zero Dark Thirty repeating the right-wing propaganda of its former-CIA consultants to rationalize the CIA torture regime so a lot of powerful people can continue evading jail time. I go on to explain that this is par for the course for the modern Hollywood U.S. war movie with very few exceptions. Well, the author never said the indoctrination was toward liberal values-- they only implied it was effective in changing ideas and values. So now they can freely pivot to one of a number of potentially contradictory positions at will (military movies are an exception, Hollywood liberal are only liberal in name, author doesn't actually believe the trope and was only using it as an example, Hollywood liberalism is uncritical and therefore subject to exploitation from other powerful propagandists like the Pentagon/China, etc.).
In light of that it is worth noting-- especially on HN-- that there is writing in the humanities that doesn't merely "ask questions," but also does research, provides evidence, and takes a stance based on that evidence. This isn't an example of that.
Ah: white, liberal households.
I’m the first to say that not everything should be about politics, but I’ve always strongly associated that show with the left. I’ve never heard a conservative reference it at all.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty transparent attempt to let readers of the NYT feel good about themselves.
Conservatives during the 00’s more strongly identified with 24, a universe where politicians and bureaucrats were sometimes virtuous, sometimes corrupt, and sometimes evil, but the hero was Jack Bauer, one of the rough men who stands ready to do violence on our behalf as we sleep soundly in our beds, usually in a very literal sense.
If you've not read it: good, keep your life that way. For the people out there that have: I'm sorry.
The 'plot' is akin to 24, in that there is a good guy that kill bad guys. But the writing style, the aggressive use of exposition, the terrible dialog, and the total lack of logic in scene construction make the book just terrible. The part where the protagonist blinks out the message "Airstrike now. 35 41 46 N / 51 25 23 E" (the coordinates for Tehran) is comically unrealistic. If you actually put that into morse code you get : .- .. .-. ... - .-. .. -.- . / -. --- .-- .-.-.- / ...-- ..... / ....- .---- / ....- -.... / -. / -..-. / ..... .---- / ..--- ..... / ..--- ...-- / . You try blinking that out.
I've no idea who his editor was or who his ghostwriter is, but good Lord, Ben really needs to get better at spotting grifters. That book is hot garbage.
Society perceiving me to be lesser and doomed to mediocrity wears on the soul!
But if the author thinks reading the NYT, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic is the way of "Elite" America, I disagree. It's a microcosm of a bubble, and that's no way to be elite about anything real.