Category: History

The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 5 – The Corporate IP Death Cycle

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The Corporate I.P. Death Cycle The decline of creative industries has given rise to what I call the “Corporate I.P. Death Cycle,” wherein corporations routinely resurrect their nostalgic franchise properties to return them to relevance and profitability. I.P., in this case, means “Intellectual Property” and composes the copyrighted works and rights to derivative works, as well as trademarks. Like real property, intellectual property is expected to generate a return in the form of rents or other products for sale. A movie or similar entertainment product is not viewed by the corporation that produced it as a work of art existing…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 4 – Cultural Ground Zero

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Cultural Ground Zero If you aren’t familiar with the concept of cultural ground zero (a term I owe to authors JD Cowan and Brian Niemeier), it is the idea that the major entertainment industries reached a zenith, and after this, quality began to decrease, and all trends lost their forward momentum. The exact year is 1997, in case you were wondering, though the video game industry continued to progress for another ten years on the back of new technology and industry growth, reaching its own ground zero in 2007. For most media, 1997 was the last year consumers could reasonably…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 3

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Popular Art “Popular culture” as a term is nearly a tautology; it follows that if we share a common culture, the elements that make up that shared culture are popular. In use, “pop culture” refers to the art that, in the free market, gains ascendency to the point where knowledge of it becomes part of the common culture. This idea only has meaning in contrast to other origins of culture—constructs such as “high culture,” “fine art,” “literary fiction,” and my favorite tautology, “art music.” These later ideas are defined primarily by not being popular culture and, therefore, in an unfortunate…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 2

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Hyperdrive Media The model which defines the corporate period could not function without two important factors. First, the model requires the ability to legally collectivize resources and use them as if they belonged to a single person. This is the concept of the corporation, with “corporate” meaning body, as in the company acts like a person and can own property like a person without being “a” person. The other critical ingredient is mass media, which allows the distribution of a media product to large numbers of people while maintaining a low cost to the end consumer. The technological revolutions of…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 1

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The origins of corporate art If you’ve ever taken an art history or music history course, or surveys of architecture or literature, it’s likely you have seen various styles and trends in the arts cordoned off into various “periods” beginning and ending at certain dates. For instance in music the Classical period is generally said to begin in 1750 (the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque) and end in the early 19th century, about 1820, at which time the Romantic period begins. Today, I’d like to introduce a recently ended artistic period: The Corporate Period. But before…

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Syncretism

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Those who study ancient history might be familiar with “Syncretism,” which the Romans practiced, where foreign gods are linked with the home culture’s gods and viewed as similar expressions of the same deity or various aspects of the many gods and spirits that governed the world. For the Romans, this was a practical exercise. The key to Rome’s success (to the Romans) was piety and maintaining the Pax Deorum, or “Peace of the Gods.” Having the favor of the gods, along with the ancestors (who gave the Romans the Mos Maiorum, or “way of the ancestors”), gave the armies victory…

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The Modern “Pagan”

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I put out a little thread the other day (actually 2, since I wanted to elaborate on Paganism). In one go: Mass hypnosis is a fun concept, but I think disordered religious sentiment makes more sense. Remember pagans never called themselves anything; so the followers of the Death Cult, State Cult, and Scientism only have those labels because we have found them useful. 1000+ years of domination in the west by Christianity and Islam has made people forget that religion doesn’t usually resemble these faiths, especially when it comes to self-identification. Milius was right when Conan asks, “What gods do…

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It Goes Both Ways

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We’ve spent the last 4 years on the butt-end of Trump Derangement syndrome, a very real psychological phenomenon affecting millions of people worldwide, not just Americans. They’ve been conditioned to vacillate and quiver by a constant stream of emotionally-charged “information” (using that term loosely, because as I have pointed out, most news is false even when the journalists aren’t lying, which they often are). What I think we forget is that these things can go the other way as well, not so much in “Democrat derangement syndrome” but in viewing Trump as something more than he is. To most of…

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Optimates and the First Order of the Good

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I’ve started using the term “Optimate” instead of political labels like “conservative,” “Libertarian,” “Republican,” etc. I’d like to explain a little about why, and just what “Optimate” means to me. Optimates means “The good men” and the Optimate approach is being “for the good.” It is borrowed from late Roman Republic politics and was a political faction that favored doing the “right” things above doing “popular” things (which gave rise to the “Populares” who favored social, military, and political reform). Why not “Conservative”? We already have this term and have had it for some time to represent politics of the…

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The Dangers of Social Media in 2020 – what you NEED to know as a creator or a user

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Following up on some recent videos and livestreams regarding social media, here is what you NEED to know as either a creator or as just a user (or both) regarding social media platforms in 2020: Terms of Service are a red herring. Each platform represents a technical monopoly with little or no competition The core functionality is severely damaged I’ll expand on these below, but here’s what this basically translates into: There is no behavior pattern that can keep you from getting banned The “alternative” platforms are not alternatives at all The service is set up to NOT give you…

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