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I've been a fan of Simon Pegg since he unleashed Spaced into the world. His immersion since then into nerdy culture is rivaled by few others. So, when he spouts off on the state of "infantalizing consumers as a means of non-aggressive control" via popular culture, I tend to respect it a bit more. He's speaking from inside the machine, rather than outside looking in. This recent spouting off; entitled Big Mouth Strikes Again, seems best summed up when he's talking about "French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard" and his book 'America':
Is the Internet creating a culture of meaningless passion? I don't think it's a black-and-white argument or should be boiled down to blanket statements about being Good or being Bad but I am intrigued by the idea that we keep ourselves in a perpetual state of childhood in order to avoid having to grow up. Thanks for the thoughts Mr. Pegg.
Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth? A time when we were shielded from painful truths by our recreational passions, the toys we played with, the games we played, the comics we read. There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election.Yes, it's wordy but really take that in. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in... That's a hard point to argue with.
Is the Internet creating a culture of meaningless passion? I don't think it's a black-and-white argument or should be boiled down to blanket statements about being Good or being Bad but I am intrigued by the idea that we keep ourselves in a perpetual state of childhood in order to avoid having to grow up. Thanks for the thoughts Mr. Pegg.
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