Intellectual Property Harvesting
That spirit of innovation in mainstream entertainment that we of the Gen X generation enjoyed has since been crushed in a tide of remakes, reboots, and sequels. The mainstream cultural sector – the media conglomerates that control the films, TV, and music that make popular culture – is increasingly interested in producing its own intellectual property. They want it ready-made. They don’t create: they harvest. Like so many venture capitalists, they are more about extraction than generation. They sweat existing assets instead of enabling scriptwriters and directors. Why risk it?
Why indeed, when there’s so much IP lying about with a near-guaranteed audience. The works of JRR Tolkien have become his own Moria, strip-mined for storylines, aesthetics, and even mood, in the lust for wealth. Expect to see dramatisations of his letters or animated visions of his poems in the not-too-distant future. Gotta keep churning.
In publishing, it’s possibly worse. Ghostwritten celebrity memoirs dominate the charts. Book deals go to influencers and personalities who “bring a platform”. Publishers say these books are profitable and enable them to publish the books they really want, but their bandwidth is limited. Good luck to authors trying to get a book deal unless they’re already well-known. (I know this all too well. When I was trying to find a publisher for my book about Pink Floyd, I constantly got the response: “Great book, love the writing, but you’ve no platform, so no thank you.”) That’s the game now: platform over prose, metrics over merit. Creativity is too risky.
Notes:
Folksonomies: cultural stagnation
Taxonomies:
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/art and entertainment/books and literature (0.703207)
/art and entertainment/movies (0.629152)
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Concepts:
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Culture (0.861981): dbpedia_resource
Popular culture (0.849229): dbpedia_resource
Gen X Suffers Mainstream Culture Constipation