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Stories that are obviously about contemporary events are surprisingly few right now and not that great. The Bots, Don’t Look Up… Circumstantial but interesting.
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“Global collapse” is something that has basically never happened. At best there are distant historical memories of continent-scale collapses. So any pattern match should be bad and any pattern match to living memory should be extra bad.
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But as pattern matching and producing addicts we turn our attention to nostalgic reboots and escapism instead and total volume of storytelling stats on trend. So the test is dip in relative proportion of stories that feel like they speak squarely to current situations.
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Specific example: US Presidents were portrayed with a certain conventional tropey gravitas for decades by Morgan Freeman or Martin Sheen types. That’s continued unchanged! I haven’t seen a Trumpy president in a movie yet.
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Of course we should fail to pattern match unprecedented positive developments too. But that’s happened much more frequently in living memory so we’ve learned to expect wrongness on upside unexpectedness.
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Samuelson’s quip “The stock market predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions” gets at the heart of the problem. Just because we are overly pessimistic doesn’t mean recessions never happen. Panglossian outlooks are just as messed up. The problem is even worse outside of markets.
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Optimists tend to be wrong about the if. Pessimists tend to be wrong about the when and how. If pessimists say X will happen at T1 and optimists say X can’t happen, a Y similar to X will happen at T2 > T1 and both will claim rightness. And also Z will happen confusing everyone.
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There’s always something different about big shifts but *different* different is when the logic of history shifts. It’s like a different extended universe, not a sequel within what you thought you were watching. “Oh we’ve moved from MCU to DCEU now, that’s why it sucks!” sense
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Conjecture: the per-capita demand for stories per hour hour of leisure never changes (so the aggregate demand is a function of population and productivity). This means the mix of supply is very revealing. We haven’t yet figured out how to interpret it.
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We have little alchemical folk notions like “vampire stories during booms, zombie stories during recessions” and theories about why specific stories hit a nerve. But we don’t have a “narrative portfolio theory”
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Replying to
Netflix top 10 and trending are good indicators? seems like its mostly 90s early 2000s movies/shows or new movies that have the early 2000s aesthetics
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