Television and Radio are 75% advertisement.
Most of my favorite youtubers from 2010s are gone replaced with nonstop politics, drama, reaction, and streaming content farming.
I feel it in my heart that short form content is damaging everyones attention spans especially my tablet ridden younger family members.
Weekend trips to Blockbusters to rent out a game and movie is gone.
When I go into the search bar on YouTube I see stuff literally called “brain break” and “brain rot”.
I switch on the news and its 90% pure political propagandano matter the station.
Even the memes suck now, say what you want about caption memes and dancing babies and troll face, Pepe, me gusta but that shit was at least comprehensible in humor. go on 67 Wikipedia and it literally says “It has no fixed meaning.”
Even the steam store just feels different now. Its full of gooner porn bait visual novels and mundane activity sims and 1 season relevant fps shooters.
All the stuff I enjoyed is gone, and everything they make now seems so empty and pessimistic now. The last bastion of enjoyment zi have is older media and indie made stuff by a few select artist/small teams . Is this just me getting old yelling at clouds, or is something wrong?
The Silent Generation Boomers said this about us watching half hour TV shows.
Maybe go back and read some Jacques Derrida, because the idea that meaning of words and ideas isn’t fixed isn’t exactly new.
You take that back about Dispatch right now!
But more seriously, content changed. Young people just don’t watch scripted television and movies in the same form or capacity that we do. Due to this, the budget for that kind of entertainment is slowly receding, because why would companies pour money into a type of content that isn’t really making the returns on investment they want because all the old people who enjoy it are slowly dying? It would be like people who grew up in the early 1900s complaining about “talkies” in the 1930s because they preferred the old silent films of their youth. It really isn’t for us to say which is better or worse, as much as it is for us to find what’s good out of the new stuff that is being produced. There’s more content than ever out there, which means you have to sift through more to find good stuff.
Like I mean, that’s just part of getting older, the things we enjoy become less popular, and by extension, less money is invested in making good products that cater to that audience anymore.
Also, counterpoint: Baldur’s Gate 3 was a return to 1990s western CRPG style and it fucking dominated financially. No other game of that style has come close to that kind of popularity for a long, long time. No, Bethesda games don’t count because they don’t actually lock you out of different outcomes from the choices you make. The Witcher games also don’t count because there’s not a real RPG, build-your-own-character aspect to them, you’re just Geralt whether you liked it or not. When classic styles of media are done well, people still respond positively to them.
Finally, corporate enshittification dominates all of this, leading to a feedback loop of companies putting less and less money into anything quality at all ever because they don’t think its valuable to invest in anything except stock buybacks and firing employees to pump their stock prices.
There’s a lot of aspects to it, and a lot of it has to do with markets and how we’re no longer the target market, the coveted 18-24 demographic that made our own brain rot television such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force so popular in the early 2000s when we were in that target demographic. Brain rot media has always been there, in the form of absurdist comedy. You go back farther and you had stuff like Mr. Show and The State. When I think of my own high school graduating class, I think most of them were dimwitted fucking idiots, and I don’t think it was because they watched short form media: I think it’s because most humans are genuinely dimwitted fucking idiots.
Anyway, I’ll stop rambling, but yeah we’re just getting old and we’re not the audience that is being catered to anymore.