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In his irregular newsletter, Culture: An Owner’s Manual, W. David Marx wrote about the age of the double sell-out. His argument is that, by the end of the 20th century, it was deemed acceptable for artists to sell-out because commercial activities were understood to pay for creative work, but now culture’s most successful creators sell-out simply to sell-out further.
In fact, the 21st century has been the age of the “double sell-out”: Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame — and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce’s-sake. MrBeast is arguably one of the most important “creators” of our times. He dreams up, produces, and directs elaborate and sensational video content, which made him the #1 channel on YouTube. He then used this world-historical level of fame… to open a generic fast food chain.
I don’t agree entirely with Marx’s categorisation of poptimism, but I do share his ultimate conclusion: that we should work to “re-shift the norms towards, at least, ‘Don’t be a double sell-out.'” This ought to be true of the media more generally. The relationship between readers and publishers has grown fuzzy in the digital age, in ways we all understand by now, producing an audience that is less discerning and a media business that is less accountable. The only real solution is to be a total snob about what’s cool and what’s not, and then to support what’s cool with the enthusiasm of a teenager with a favourite band while being consistently, petulantly mean about everything else.
This is happening, of course. 404 Media merch is basically band merch. I am, as ever, just salty about the relative paucity of cool websites in video games. No, that one doesn’t count. No, that other one doesn’t either, sorry. Sundays are for being irreverent.
The late Tim Radford, former Guardian science editor, was working in a different time when he noted in 2011 that “you have to have readers”, but his “25 commandments for journalists” still hold true all the same.
Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.
I’ve been a watcher of day-in-the-life YouTube vlogs since 2020, when it felt like they replaced a tincture of human experience I’d lost amid Covid lockdowns. Now they’re being AI generated, because of course they are, as Alex Sujong Laughlin writes about for Defector. Perhaps more interestingly, humans are now creating DITL videos which mimic the AI slop, thus completing the content ouroboros. You’ll want to go read this one just for the links it contains.
These are all bizarro AI-slop interpretations of the DITL genre, “filmed” from a first person perspective, often prominently featuring hands and feet with too many fingers and toes and the sounds of labored breathing to indicate fear. Their value lies not in their accuracy but in their uncanniness. There is no danger of mistaking them for something made by humans, but their depictions of historic tragedies are compelling in a bleak and voyeuristic way.
Philosopher Mary Midgley argued that “a certain over-abstractness” in European philosophical tradition could be the consequence of many philosophers living their entire lives as bachelors, without women and children, who are “after all, quite an important aspect of human life.” Midgley’s observations were rejected by the BBC when made in a radio script in the 1950s, but are explored in her later work and by Ellie Robson in an article for Aeon.
Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them. With Descartes still firmly in her crosshairs, Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ – the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists. Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation.
I enjoyed this brief Bluesky thread from Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic. “Questions that might make you appear dumb to the interviewee are usually some of the best questions” holds true in my experience, and is great advice.
Former RPS editor-in-chief Katharine Castle departed Eurogamer and games journalism this past week after 13-years in the trenches. Katharine is, for all practical purposes, the only person other than me to ever edit this website, and I and the industry will miss her hard work. You can mark the occasion by reading her final article, a Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition review.
For ten years, Xenoblade Chronicles X has lived as the black sheep of Monolith Soft’s grand RPG series. Its nameless, blank canvas protagonist, its full tilt into hard military sci-fi, and its recruitable cast of misfit, gung-ho soldier types all stand in direct opposition to the soaring fantasy and authored melodrama of its numbered stablemates. It couldn’t look or feel more different on the surface, but playing X again now, a decade on from its original release, I’ve been surprised by just how much it laid the foundations for what was to come later in the series.
I’ve been back in the Japanese music rabbit hole this week, and my browser is groaning under the weight of so many tabs that I suspect it might be a few weeks more before I find my way back out. Two tracks for you this week: the plaintive Stop! by Arko Lemming aka Koresuke Arishima from 2018; and 青い、濃い、橙色の日 (which Google translates as “Blue, deep and orange sun”) by shoegaze/math rock megastars Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs. I could have included really any MOTFD song, and I highly recommend their 2009 album World Is Yours (which you can find in full on YouTube). As always, all Sunday Papers music picks are in a YouTube playlist of their own.
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Kurt Indovina
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