this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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me_irl
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I had this exact train of thought when I was eighteen and ended up building a career and a half on top of that particular crisis.
I was going to say no regrets, but... you know, some regrets?
I can tell when a movie is good now, though.
Weirdly, that somehow became a huge political problem on the Internet and ended up killing democracy. I guess that's one of the regrets.
Wait, are you saying you invented social media to learn more about assessing the quality of films/media? ๐
Oh, no, I wish. If democracy was gonna get destroyed anyway I may as well have gotten paid.
No, it's just that when I was studying all the stuff about criticism, public opinion, semiotics and all that jazz nobody cared about it, it was a weird thing for nerds who had an existential crisis after watching The Truman Show or whatever.
And then the whole thing became the core of a mainstream culture war that resulted in the second coming of fascism. In academia they looked at all the data from the first rise of fascism as a weird historical artifact of runaway extremism and then boom, we're all right back in it. You guys are just living history, but for people in this space this is fucking Jurassic Park. They spent years preparing to calmly brush off dust from buried bones and then you blink and everybody is feeding branches to the brontosauruses and getting eaten by the raptors. It's just not what you signed up for.