You’re right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.
I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward “woke” (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists (“Get woke, go broke”), but still pretty significantly.
Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in viewership right at the scene depicting police profiling the main character for being black. As far as I know, there was never a corresponding upswing from people who were excited about this material being depicted in the MCU.
A lot of these companies seem to have decided to send strongly left-coded messages like this and then tag audiences who object “toxic fandom”. Electoral evidence gives me the sense that left vs. right is pretty evenly split in the population. The usual move in the past has been to be as unoffensive as possible so as to appeal to a wide audience base. So this swing seems like a pretty wide-spanning decision that profit lies so overwhelmingly with left-leaning audiences that alienating right-leaning folk is absolutely worth it, even if it doesn’t create a correspondingly large number of strong left-leaning folk to start watching.
But since profit in media companies tends to be attached to raw viewership numbers, I get confused. Something doesn’t add up.
Even saying it’s ideological (like right-leaning folk often assert) doesn’t stack up. Why would all of them suddenly become ideological in the same direction? Wouldn’t those who are just profit-focused benefit from not going ideological?
So it really does seem like a profit motive, but the profit mechanism isn’t at all clear to me.
Whenever I talk to people clearly aligned with the left in this front of the culture wars, I get the clear sense that they think they’ve simply won. That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated, etc. But that’s not the impression I get at all when interacting with folk outside left info bubbles. (Strangely, I often get the opposite impression: lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood, that the reality of viewership will come home to roost eventually, etc. The info bubbling goes both ways on this.)
So I’m looking around and wondering: Gosh, did these companies solve the problem of the polluted information commons and actually determined that profit lies so, so much with the left that alienating the right is worth it? How did they do that? What do they know?
That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated
lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood
Perhaps both of these groups are broadly right about the size of their direct opposition? I don’t think most people are super invested in the culture war, whatever their leanings at the ballot box. Few people decline to consume media they consider broadly interesting because of whatever minor differences from media of the past are being called “woke” these days.
I think what’s going on profit-wise is, most people don’t care about the politics, there are a few who love it and a few who hate it. So the companies want to primarily sell to the majority who don’t care. They do this by drumming up attention.
Whenever one of these “woke” properties comes out, there is inevitably a huge culture war battle over it on Twitter, and everywhere else on the Internet where most of it is written by insane people. It’s free advertising. Normies see that crap, and they don’t care much about what people are arguing about, but the property they’re arguing over sticks in their minds.
So if it’s all about being controversial, why is it always left-messaging? This I’m less sure of. But I suspect as you say any political messaging will alienate some people, including normies. It’s just that left-politics tends to alienate normies less since the culture has been mandating anti-racism for decades, and anti-wokism is a new thing that mainly only online culture warriors care about.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging? Suppose your example of the racial profiling scene were reversed to be a right-leaning message about racial profiling, what would it look like? A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”? Maybe I’m biased, but I think the general culture would be far more alienated by that than it was by the actual scene.
That… makes a lot of sense actually. A lot. PT Barnum style advertising. I had not considered that. Thank you.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging?
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
It doesn’t strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.
But that’s after about 20 seconds of thought. I’m sure I’m missing something important here.
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
A good old “America fuck yeah” movie would certainly be cool now that I think about it. The most recent movie that pops into my mind is “Top Gun: Maverick”. Though I haven’t seen it, I imagine it’s largely about American airmen being tough, brave and heroic and taking down the bad guys. I haven’t seen anybody getting into culture-war arguments over that movie though. I’m sure there are some people on Twitter saying it’s too “American exceptionalist” or whatever but it certainly is nowhere near the same level of conflict prompted by, say, She-Hulk or Rings of Power or anything like that.
My guess is that for both the left and the right, there are values they prioritize which are pretty uncontroversial (among normal people) and having pride in America and, say, our role in WW2 is one of those for the right (and being proud of MLK and the civil rights movement would be one for the left)
Then there’s the more controversial stuff each side believes, the kinds of things said by weird and crazy people on the Internet. I don’t have quantitative data on this and I’m just going off vibes, but when it’s between someone talking about “the intersectional oppression of bipoclgbtqiaxy+ folx” and someone talking about “the decline of Western Civilization spurred on by the (((anti-white Hollywood)))”, to a lot of people the first one just seems strange and disconnected from real issues, while the second one throws up serious red flags reminiscent of a certain destructive ideology which America helped defeat in WW2.
You want something that’s not too alienating overall, but which will reliably stir up the same old debate on the Internet.
In summary it seems to me that it’s much easier to signal left-wing politics in a way which starts a big argument which most normies will see as meaningless and will not take a side on. If you try to do the same with right-wing politics, you run more risk of the normies siding with the “wokists” in the ensuing argument because the controversial right-wing culture war positions tend to have worse optics.
You’re right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.
I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward “woke” (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists (“Get woke, go broke”), but still pretty significantly.
Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic drop-off in viewership right at the scene depicting police profiling the main character for being black. As far as I know, there was never a corresponding upswing from people who were excited about this material being depicted in the MCU.
A lot of these companies seem to have decided to send strongly left-coded messages like this and then tag audiences who object “toxic fandom”. Electoral evidence gives me the sense that left vs. right is pretty evenly split in the population. The usual move in the past has been to be as unoffensive as possible so as to appeal to a wide audience base. So this swing seems like a pretty wide-spanning decision that profit lies so overwhelmingly with left-leaning audiences that alienating right-leaning folk is absolutely worth it, even if it doesn’t create a correspondingly large number of strong left-leaning folk to start watching.
But since profit in media companies tends to be attached to raw viewership numbers, I get confused. Something doesn’t add up.
Even saying it’s ideological (like right-leaning folk often assert) doesn’t stack up. Why would all of them suddenly become ideological in the same direction? Wouldn’t those who are just profit-focused benefit from not going ideological?
So it really does seem like a profit motive, but the profit mechanism isn’t at all clear to me.
Whenever I talk to people clearly aligned with the left in this front of the culture wars, I get the clear sense that they think they’ve simply won. That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated, etc. But that’s not the impression I get at all when interacting with folk outside left info bubbles. (Strangely, I often get the opposite impression: lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood, that the reality of viewership will come home to roost eventually, etc. The info bubbling goes both ways on this.)
So I’m looking around and wondering: Gosh, did these companies solve the problem of the polluted information commons and actually determined that profit lies so, so much with the left that alienating the right is worth it? How did they do that? What do they know?
Perhaps both of these groups are broadly right about the size of their direct opposition? I don’t think most people are super invested in the culture war, whatever their leanings at the ballot box. Few people decline to consume media they consider broadly interesting because of whatever minor differences from media of the past are being called “woke” these days.
I think what’s going on profit-wise is, most people don’t care about the politics, there are a few who love it and a few who hate it. So the companies want to primarily sell to the majority who don’t care. They do this by drumming up attention.
Whenever one of these “woke” properties comes out, there is inevitably a huge culture war battle over it on Twitter, and everywhere else on the Internet where most of it is written by insane people. It’s free advertising. Normies see that crap, and they don’t care much about what people are arguing about, but the property they’re arguing over sticks in their minds.
So if it’s all about being controversial, why is it always left-messaging? This I’m less sure of. But I suspect as you say any political messaging will alienate some people, including normies. It’s just that left-politics tends to alienate normies less since the culture has been mandating anti-racism for decades, and anti-wokism is a new thing that mainly only online culture warriors care about.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging? Suppose your example of the racial profiling scene were reversed to be a right-leaning message about racial profiling, what would it look like? A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”? Maybe I’m biased, but I think the general culture would be far more alienated by that than it was by the actual scene.
That… makes a lot of sense actually. A lot. PT Barnum style advertising. I had not considered that. Thank you.
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
It doesn’t strike me as too strange or difficult to do this.
But that’s after about 20 seconds of thought. I’m sure I’m missing something important here.
A good old “America fuck yeah” movie would certainly be cool now that I think about it. The most recent movie that pops into my mind is “Top Gun: Maverick”. Though I haven’t seen it, I imagine it’s largely about American airmen being tough, brave and heroic and taking down the bad guys. I haven’t seen anybody getting into culture-war arguments over that movie though. I’m sure there are some people on Twitter saying it’s too “American exceptionalist” or whatever but it certainly is nowhere near the same level of conflict prompted by, say, She-Hulk or Rings of Power or anything like that.
My guess is that for both the left and the right, there are values they prioritize which are pretty uncontroversial (among normal people) and having pride in America and, say, our role in WW2 is one of those for the right (and being proud of MLK and the civil rights movement would be one for the left)
Then there’s the more controversial stuff each side believes, the kinds of things said by weird and crazy people on the Internet. I don’t have quantitative data on this and I’m just going off vibes, but when it’s between someone talking about “the intersectional oppression of bipoclgbtqiaxy+ folx” and someone talking about “the decline of Western Civilization spurred on by the (((anti-white Hollywood)))”, to a lot of people the first one just seems strange and disconnected from real issues, while the second one throws up serious red flags reminiscent of a certain destructive ideology which America helped defeat in WW2.
You want something that’s not too alienating overall, but which will reliably stir up the same old debate on the Internet.
In summary it seems to me that it’s much easier to signal left-wing politics in a way which starts a big argument which most normies will see as meaningless and will not take a side on. If you try to do the same with right-wing politics, you run more risk of the normies siding with the “wokists” in the ensuing argument because the controversial right-wing culture war positions tend to have worse optics.