The business philosophy of "maximize shareholder value above all else" is going to eviscerate our society until there's nothing of quality left.
Hollywood has always been a dirty and money-focused business, but it seems like the latest crop of execs are hellbent on entirely divorcing the creative enterprise from its human elements. Now studios are just exotic financial instruments that seek to turn "content" into stock prices.
Everything measured and optimised for shallow goals goes into the gutter. As the analytics overtook decision making, the quality of everything declined sharply.
IMHO, it's happening because we the humans optimize for proxy metrics which once were good as a proxy to the real thing but with the computer age they turned into shallow goals that end up destroying the real thing as the optimisation became too robust. Removing the human element from the machinery creates a fatigue on the remaining parts and the consumers. All jobs have become horrible, even if the productivity increases the optimisations end up destroying the workforce and this started eating into the society because no one is happy with their job and life. Seamen no longer can see the world through their sailing career because the stays at the ports are too short, a person can't have a simple job and a simple life because the simple job is optimised into exhaustion.
"As the analytics overtook decision making, the quality of everything declined sharply."
Pretty much. I'm sure Hollywood execs have always wanted to make as much money as they could, but they also (formerly) didn't want to be known as guys who only made terrible movies. Prestige, vanity, relationships, reputation...unanalyzable human factors are really important for the production of human-centric products like art and entertainment.
Couldn't Have Said It Better. It expands to everything, every job has perks and qualities that cannot be measured qualitatively and optimisations eat into it. As people spend most of their lives working, this degradation destroys people's life satisfaction too.
Or if you want to get philosophical about it, reification. Which is something the Frankfurt School (despised by some as "Cultural Marxists") discussed with great depth and subtlety
Completely agree. And the worst part is that sentiment is used as a completely valid reason/excuse.
"They are just doing what is legally required of them and maximizing shareholder value!!".
People throw that out in there as if it's some inherent law of nature that can't be questioned. No- it's an intentionally created human construct by the rich & powerful to completely excuse them of any actions.
I can't recall any STNG episode where they solve some tech issue by doing the same thing but after a restart or two.
Didn't computers at the time of writing have the state problem solved by reboots? Like, reloading the program was essentially the same thing or something?
The quality of movies released from Hollywood in the last 5 years has been abysmal. It made sense to have large studios when film cost dollars per foot and needed an army of editors in post. Today you could film a 1960s blockbuster on 10k of equipment and a medium sized desktop computer with a few friends.
> The business philosophy of "maximize shareholder value above all else" is going to eviscerate our society until there's nothing of quality left.
Well no, because there are literally an entire industry (luxury goods) where the main selling point is quality, and I don't see any sign that's going to disappear anytime soon.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with luxury goods, but there are lots of YouTube channels and analyses of the quality of luxury products, and it’s not what you think it is. They’re maximizing shareholder value too, they’re just going after people narcissistic and wealthy enough to not notice that they’re buying junk that’s dressed up because the brand name means something to them.
Some of them, sure. But a lot of luxury products are Veblen goods, where the demand is created by the high price itself, rather than the quality. Status symbols and the like.
If you think all LVMH workers have good working conditions, or that materials are sourced ethically, I have bad news for you.
Quality doesn't prevent the search of profit maximization. Hell, luxury goods aren't even about quality. The price/quality ratio on your Vuitton Bag or your Ferrari is down in the gutter. You're buying a social status, not quality.
Sapporo's "innovations" for the Anchor brand were to pick a fight with labor, tinker with the recipe of their most historic beer, and green-light of the most infamously eye-searing rebrands in recent memory.
It's a good idea to target your product to the sensibilities of your consumer.
American Millenials and Gen Z are having less sex than the generations before them.
They've also grown up with frequent mass school shootings and the "tactical", "everyday carry", amateur-soldier, military worship culture that really got rolling after 9/11.
No wonder sex scenes squick them out -- it's a world that's distant, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable for them.
Violence, though? Pile it on. Now you're speaking their language.
People act like the only point of narrative work is to tell a story and advance a plot, forgetting that some of the greatest novels, plays, and movies of all time have creaky plots and barely-there stories, and plenty of "unnecessary" stuff.
I think the difference is that "What constitutes necessary in art?" is pretty much a closed debate, as it's related to the nature of art, while for entertainment it's a bit different, as it's often (at least in that case it is) made for mass consumption. Since it's made for mass consumption, you can more easily argue about their moral responsibilities than with "art".
> The new question with the approved honest accurate words, not like that original agenda'd deceptive one, still stands.
True. I guess it's pretty much just product (or should I say "content") that we're discussing, despite all the lip service given to the idea that it's this really creative endeavor.
Religion, at least the dominant Evangelical Christian kind, has gotten increasingly politicized, to the point where religious == conservative (note I'm using JS-style "truthy" here, I know that this isn't a blanket case).
So it's not surprising that young Americans, who are generally liberal, don't consider themselves religious.
And as for having kids? Not only is it more expensive and stressful than ever before, but we're slowly moving away from the mindset that a woman's primary purpose is to raise children.
That, and I think a lot of folks have started to reflect on how having kids didn't seem to make their unhappy parents any more fulfilled.
Religion was always political it's just a modern slight of hand to label the prevailing ideology secular and dis-empower the clergy. Does not seem to have worked very long though. I think we'll see more political moves by religion and those who choose to embrace it moving forward.
The poll mentions "patriotism", not "nationalism", and I think those are two different things. "Nationalism" increasingly refers to an exclusivist mindset, whereas "patriotism" at least used to be more "pride in one's country".
Older people grew up during the Cold War, when the USA perceived itself as a bulwark of freedom and democracy in a world of opaque, totalitarian regimes, and when the country was further ahead than most of the rest of the world in development.
These days, a lot of the rest of the world has caught up, and a lot of younger Americans feel discouraged about the state of democracy in their own country. We aren't at the vanguard of freedom and functional government anymore.
Plus, over the past few decades, "patriotism" has been increasingly associated with flag/anthem worship, military boosting, and a kind of rah-rah "USA! USA!" attitude that has little to do with freedom and democracy. It's been turned into a marketing tool and a cudgel that right-wing political groups have used against their opponents since the Vietnam War.
You should go find a Holocaust survivor and check. I'm sure many of them take comfort in the fact that destruction of their lives contributed to the progress of science.
I'm not sure what you were trying to achieve with all the gratuitous Nazi references in this thread, but please don't post like this to HN. It leads to flamewars and we don't want those here.
It's a point of view that makes no sense. Murdering one person to save another is not "noble". It negates the entire point of "human rights" in the first place.
You might as well suggest that people who need organs should be able to kill a random person on the street to get them.
I think the OP was merely opining that they'd rather see this, than people dying for pure profit motive. I know that, were I provided a choice between killing someone for forced organ donation that could potentially save lives, versus killing someone for greed, profit, or punishment, with no way to say "no", I'd choose the former. Making it clear, however, that I'd rather never have to make that choice in the first place.
I guess to me, it makes no moral difference. The means corrupt the end. The Nazis managed to get some useful science out of the Jews during the Holocaust, but it's hard to see that as a silver lining.
I think that if you're at the level of making those kinds of choices, you're already living in hell.
I'd agree there. I don't think humans are at a point (nor will they ever be at a point) where they're capable of making such decisions without corruption clouding things.
Not that it makes a moral difference, but the victims aren't all hardened criminals. They are political dissidents, people who follow the wrong religion, and racial minorities.
Most of the greatest mass atrocities in world history have been framed as a "tradeoff". Destroying some lives to save others isn't a functioning society, it's a living nightmare.
Honestly, if we were even going to begin to entertain any notions even slightly related to this, I'd want to suggest that if we insist on having the death penalty as a punishment, then those who are put to death should, if suitable, become automatic organ donors.
Nah that's totally ridiculous. Death is as serious a punishment as possible and can never be appealed once delivered, there should never be any incentives to deliver the death sentence besides seeing that justice is done.
Let me be clear that I'm not advocating for capital punishment at all, I'm staunchly against it. But honestly, if we're going to decide that we're allowed to kill people in the name of justice, it's arguable that the deceased's bodies should be used to help save lives.
Well, lots of things are arguable to some extent, but really the idea that the state should materially benefit from murdering its own citizens is pretty difficult to defend in my opinion. The moment a judge starts to think "well, what about all the lives this prisoner's healthy organs will save?" when deciding whether or not to give a death sentence, your society is 100% fucked. If anything your hypothetical society should deliberately not take the organs of any one sentenced to death.
Absolutely not. If anything their bodies should be protected from any kind of harvesting as to not incentivize the state from handing out death penalties.
I believe the death penalty should be abolished anyway. But, disregarding the complexity of the implementation of such a policy, if the government is in the business of ending people's lives, I'd rather it be done to directly help people, instead of in a punitive fashion. If you think about it, the death penalty isn't really a punishment - some people commit heinous crimes specifically so they can be killed.
"Suicide by Justice" doesn't seem like it would be or is a popular enough form of suicide to warrant what you're suggesting. Your logic doesn't make much sense.
"The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we insist on calling a “drug problem.”"
We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.
Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in the first place.
> weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump
This breaks the site guidelines against flamebait and name-calling. Would you mind reviewing them? Taking threads further into flamewar is what's most important to avoid here.
Hollywood has always been a dirty and money-focused business, but it seems like the latest crop of execs are hellbent on entirely divorcing the creative enterprise from its human elements. Now studios are just exotic financial instruments that seek to turn "content" into stock prices.