Comment by nephihaha
8 hours ago
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
It seems that cultural domination is dwindling. At least in Russia. Hollywood studios left the country themselves in 2022. But also Hollywood movies are of such low quality nowadays that I stopped going to cinema long before that. Also, they're stuffed with current American narrative (like LGBT propaganda) to the top that doesn't look even a little bit attractive to us. Forty years ago we could look at "American dream" in the movies and feel that we're missing something. Nowadays when LGBT narrative is pushed down my throat forcefully from every scene in the movie and every page of their books (even Sci-Fi), I just stop reading or watching. And there's no more "American dream" that we can strive for or that Hollywood movies can advertise to us. Also their dwindling sales show that this narrative is not attractive even for their own population.
American music seems to lost a lot of popularity here as well. When I hear American music on the radio, it is usually 30-50 years old or more, not the current music which feels totally commercial and artificial.
1 reply →
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
Specifically, it's Metcalfe's Law.
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
More or less... I used to have the Radio Garden app where I could listen to stations across the world until bureaucracy intervened.
It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.
Interesting -- that doesn't match my experience with South America at all! Everywhere you go, the venues mainly play local music, except maybe in Chile.