The industry is not for you

 

People form an unusual relationship when it comes to cooperation, a relationship that sometimes feels stronger than blood. As these people pour out passion to not only sell the product at the same time defending it from naysayers.

This kind of blind admiration is now more prevalent than ever thanks to the rise of social media. Corporation blind manipulation has made everyone seek value in life, not within themselves but from the shiny object that sits behind the glass window. It gets to a point where -

Objects are no longer are seen as objects

Suffice to say the industry has moved on, for better or worse. The target demographic for violence has shifted as well. It is not about understanding the project anymore, it is about exploitation to an extreme extent. Now every news about movies, shows, and music is sold with a number of streams, views, and money made to push the content. A general sense of conformity gets set by an algorithm and it gets imprinted in our brain.

Nowadays I don’t think quality matters at all, why should it? Where quantity takes the highest priority in every front of media, amalgamation of data and numbers are the wheel that spins for eternity to farm more media content for us. What is amazing about all of it is, every little thing is tested to have defenders, the naysayers might disagree but it is the defenders who feel as if the sole purpose behind purchasing the product is to gain the right to defend it from the objective criticism.

While this mentality might appear to be entirely new, it has been part of the world for a long time. More on that later…

A masterpiece of corporate manipulation, as it reached to an extent, where people willingly spend their time defending a product that they don’t make any money off of. The idea here was to view the large scale corporation not as a business but as a family. Now every AD that features a product or service gets pushed to the world with the face of family.

Adding meaning to Objects

Corporations have manipulated people into thinking the product that they push to the market adds a meaning to life. Since we live in an object driven society, every little product that comes out in the market, is treated less as a product, more of an seen-identity, dignity, blind recognisatin. For the person who lacks any purpose or any reason to continue, seeks a confirm-validation by acquiring the object.

When somebody raises a question against the product, in the mind of the devoted consumer it is not an attack on the product, it’s an attack on the personal character. The character they created within themselves for the world. If the value of the person is based on the object, anyone questioning it will threaten the very existence of their lives.

That’s why these people always flock to the social media platform to defend the companies that they are emotionally attached to. Excellent marketing, the idea of creating a family ‘figuratively’ inside the head of the consumer has always been a fascinating topic to be. The relationship that serves between a person and a corporation or a brand is very thin, thinner than water. It is a business relationship, goods are sold not for the sake of family, no, but in exchange of money.

Changing consumers many at a time

The traditional trade rules are now masquarding itself as family behavior. Even though people are buying an object with money, the box, the object, the sticker, the outlet, the store, the receptionist, the employee, the billboard, the poster, helps perpetuate the lie of welcoming the consumer to the special secluded family. It is a corporation giving more value to the object & purchase to make the consumer feel an important member of the society.

The person goes out thinking they are living above equality, it changes their behavior and personal beliefs towards others. As each purchase makes their feet slowly levitate from the ground, the only thing they can do from there is to look down.

The object is what makes a man, it adds meaning to life, corporations want people to believe the product is not a product, it is an identity. A person’s validation comes from not what’s inside but what they buy in the market. Now we see a group of thousand people everywhere making a scene, defending, justifying the product no matter how meaningless it is to the world.

The concept of bringing family into trade is not a new phenomenon corporation just discovered out of ether. The textbook every corporation is plagiarizing from is a book old as time itself, it’s the holy book. When you look at the religious texts and the role religion serves to its followers now in the modern age, it is less based on faith, more along the lines of identity.

Adoption to blind belief and trust is what the holy book has taught the people who manipulate religious followers to do the bidding. To a point, where people will begin making changes themselves without being asked or told. Now that’s blind dedication, something that you can only acquire from exploiting vulnerability.

The object itself is valueless once it gets pushed to the side for another one.

Industry stance on artistic value of art

Everything ran on limitation when the industry only had a single cog in the machine. And the smoke that blasted out of the chimney was also finite. The eyes were on the product, had no expectation, so were the people making the product. Everything here was done for the sake of creation with a handful of profit in mind to keep the company alive from the brink of bankruptcy. Money that was needed was meant for survival.

But with time, came people, and boy, they had quite a lot of expectations. Getting bigger also became the motto of many companies in the world. Which resulted in bone being twisted to a deformed creature to validate the art. This metamorphosis had to be done for the art to be admired by many people but loved by only a few..

The art has always been a product

May be it is a cultural shift that was bound to happen, a change that can never be stopped. Which takes me back to the medium of video games, movies, or tv shows. Here nostalgia gets killed right on the street and we all seem to accept it. In a way, it makes sense, why this would be the case.

The workers who spend their time making the movies, shows, games, they are all running on paycheck. The property might hold a significant value to the boys who are now men. but they aren’t in the minds of workers or children in this day and age.

Same thing can be seen in the miracle drug industry: the person who set up the website, made the product design, made the bottle, or the tagline could care less about the integrity of the product. What matters here is money, the world outside demands you to sell your soul for some of it, and most will happily do it.

Killing off the old characters adds a shock value, while it can be perceived as disrespect but it is a sad pill that we all need to swallow. It is more of a statement on the world and how it treats the old wisdom. It is something that will happen, killing of old ideas, characters, vision leading to the new one, is changed. And change we can’t stop, we might hinder, but it will happen.

The industry is not for you, maybe at some point it cared but the world it is now part of, is hungry for money. If killing off characters in a movie or a show leads to more money, they will do it. If something is successful, the corporation will work tirelessly to replicate the success. It feels like someone trying to create their Mona Lisa; but they will never realize there could be only one.

And the people who work under the company will have little to no say in the artistic direction, as they all are working for money. If one fails, jump to another, repeat the same process over and over again.

Cultural shift with little regards to empathy

This cultural shift has now happened, I want to focus on video game remakes to be the critical place where the shift has occurred. People no longer care about the originality of the art anymore, or any sort of preservation. The only thing they care about is the art to be pleasing, and corporations hear this cry from people and bring everything to the state of homogeneity.

Remakes, I despise them, it is a spit on everyone who worked on the original, gave up their time and years into creating something valuable in the market. There was passion because things used to have flaws, with design that is meant to please specific people.

Creating something out of thin air is difficult, have you ever stared at a blank page, it might seem easier in the head to come up with the greatest story ever told but when you are looking at the paper physically. Every part of your body immediately gives up. And the people who had their mind come up with originality should be pushed forward in life instead of pushing down to the sideline.

But the companies seem to praise the people who came up with the original idea and lavish them with praise, but some years down the road, they will announce a remake of the original with the flaws removed. The marketing will have the old product as if it was a failure, and the new one to be the one that earns your attention and money.

Recreating an art of any kind suffocates the original. It also hides the people who made the original. It feels like a deliberate attempt at erasing history. As nowadays a remake will be hailed as better art, all the platforms will quickly put the remake first hiding the original. Since the world now runs on a strange algorithm, people will only remember the remake. And the names that were behind the original will disappear from history.

They never understand it is the flaws that add soul to the art. Removing it makes it stale and ubiquitous.

Companies nowadays will scream remakes to be faithful to the original and they definitely cared about it. If they did, they wouldn’t touch the original, they would care about the people who worked tirelessly in bringing the vision to a limited hardware.

The companies will prioritize the respect of the original rather than even thinking about remaking it. But it’s long gone now, people nowadays crave remakes, as they see the originals, not with an open mind but convenience. As the corporations in the world taught us to rely on more convenience and comfortability than trying out anything new.

People often regurgitate the same opinion, as they find remains to be a far more valuable option to bring the old games to the new generation. It was hard to see no push back against it, as people just accepted it behaving the exact way of corporations. And now we are seeing the same time reaching the shore, as I assume developers found their work to be remarkable, which in a way, makes it worthless.

Erasing the past with a thick brush

People linger on flaws, ten or twenty years down the road, anything artistic will get their own remake, erasing the past and imprinting the new age. The mistakes supposed to inspire people to create something new, it was never about erasing the original.

This entire eraser happens by the hands of a corporation. Here both consumer and developer share the same feeling.

Consumer asks, was I wrong for thinking of the game or movie or music more than a product?

Developers or artists ask if I was wrong for treating a product more than a product.

But to a corporation, it was never a movie, music, art, or a game, it was all content, always have been, always will be. Now we are seeing it all happen in front of our very own eyes, everything dwindling down to product.

Maybe at one point they called a movie a movie, but now the quietest part isn’t even worth keeping it in silence, as they openly call every art a content for the world.

The unveiling of countless remakes, sequels of dead projects just slowly took out the paint that was hiding the disgusting wall. Now all of us can see how futile everything is, even if remakes work for the industry it was done on the back of the people who made the original. Now all forgotten, as the new mind makes changes and makes fun of the old for being dated, reckless, and stupid.

The new shoes might not feel any sympathy for the wrongs of the past, as they didn’t come up with the original, they just repainted it with an acceptable look.

Creating original is hard, creating an astounding successful original art that still evokes feelings from people is damn near impossible. But the people who made the original made the impossible…possible. A lighting in the bottle, but in the end, it mattered.

The new shoes had everything set out for them, the only thing they can do is to make the changes that were considered as “bad design”. They will make the changes to feel better but soon they will find themselves under scrutiny, when the project gets another makeover by the next generation.

As a company gets money because it sees its own product as nothing but products, consumers begin to not take things seriously. If art can get replaced with newer one, then it encourages artists to stop making one. What’s the point of creating something good, if some years down the road a new group of people just fiddles the work to bring it to the state of homogeneity.

And a constant stream of mockery for believing in imagining characters is seen as a stupid and moronic. Then people will have no attachment to the characters on the screen.

This is how art dies.