Inspired by the stupidest anime i'm watching this season (16 bit sensation, which i adore), a question:
If you could go back in time and change the development of one video game, movie, album, or other piece of modern media; what would you change in order to make the world as a whole less shit?
We're not talking about "oh well i'd get PT uncancelled cause that would be cool" we're talking about trying to alter history as a whole through your actions, when all you can do is change the development path of ONE piece of media in a relatively reasonable way. What's your plan?
hard choice but I'd probably strive to make either Birth of a Nation or Triumph des Willens just completely cringe to all audiences somehow
edit: I may have misunderstood the scope of "modern" but those are two of the biggest timeline pivots in terms of both culture and impact on media
alternatively I'd make the movie The Rock way less cool, potentially preventing the second US-Iraq war
Whatever was the first piece of marketing media to refer to people who play video games as “gamers” and frame it as a cogent identity. I would replace the word “gamers” with something normal like “customer” or “fan.” This would potentially avert gamergate and the subsequent mass radicalization of young nerds into the extreme right wing.
Another option is modifying either the instructions for the voting machines used in the 2000 US presidential election to make them more coherent or maybe the marketing materials for those voting machines to make them lose their bid for the state contract. Maybe could swing the 2000 election and I don’t really know if a Gore presidency would’ve actually been that much better a timeline given how Democrats can be but at the very least the guy cared about climate change. Getting that taken seriously earlier in the timeline has gotta help something.
Another option is making whatever was Ronald Reagan’s first big hit just totally tank. Write all of his lines to just be fucking awful and impossible to perform well no matter how strong the actor. His makeup? Atrocious. Tank his career before he became a household name.
Ultimately though the material conditions of society drives media more than the superstructure drives material conditions so for all of these changes I suspect that the same outcomes would still likely happen just slightly differently.
I broadly subscribe to trends and forces. Guys like Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes were always going to happen. The powers that be can always find a guy. Public sentiment will always be reactionary and punitive, in the absence of meaningful socialist choices. We were always going to invade Iraq - we spent the '90s laying the groundwork. Our current border regime is basically a development of Operation Gatekeeper and the detention centers under Clinton. Do a web search for the former, or "Guantanamo Haiti ACT-UP." Look at the CIA, Pamyat, the Russian media class, and the statue pull-downs.
Media, language, and even presidents, are mostly downstream from what certain people want, barring the occasional fluke like Clinton just deciding to not campaign in Michigan and Iowa, thus failing to girlboss it through expanding the violence in Syria and liquidating Medicare, or whatever small variations in the horror were "supposed to" happen. Whoops.
It still would have been funny if John Hinkley Jr. had used a 9mm or better with real hollowpoints, or of the Proud Boys had actually pulled Pence's head off, though. Likewise, everyone responsible for Tom Clancy's Modern Medal of Warfare: This Time It's Personal having something funny happen to them circa ~2002 probably wouldn't make things worse, if only slightly differently bad.
Maybe I would get all the nascent OSINT guys on Something Awful into extreme kink instead.
