Sidebar: I am 100% certain that the existence of Clintās surprise family in the MCU was based on Ults and that Joss Whedon, who has a creepy raging boner for Ults, left the MCU after Disney let him introduce the family and then told him that no, he couldnāt murder an entire family in a PG-13 film because it would be ācoolā.
āI am 100% certain that the existence of Clintās surprise family in the MCU was based on Ults and that Joss Whedon, who has a creepy raging boner for Ults, left the MCU after Disney let him introduce the family and then told him that no, he couldnāt murder an entire family in a PG-13 film because it would be ācoolā.ā
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST HELL NO EW EW EW WHY WOULD HE DO THAT ULTRON ALREADY HAS SO MUCH CONFUSING CONVOLUTED BS, KILLING HIS FAMILY AND MAKING HIM ANGST FOR THAT WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY MADE ME *HATE* THAT MOVIE.
Oh my god, I would have considered dropping the entire MCU if they pulled that shitā¦ š°
I canāt prove it. Itās a personal theory. But itās assembled from facts:
a) We know Joss Whedon loves Ults, heās talked about it fairly frequently and used elements of it (like the Chitauri, who previously didnāt exist in 616) in the first Avengers film.
b) In Ults, Clint had a wife and two children that he kept very separate from his work, and they were murdered as part of aĀ āSteve in conflict with SHIELDā arc.Ā
c) We know that Whedon came into conflict with the powers that be at the MCU over the farmhouse. He wanted more farmhouse and to cut the āThor In The Prophecy Wellā arc. They said no, you leave the Thor scenes in or we will make you cut the farmhouse out entirely. Which means that Disney didnāt give a shit about Clintās surprise family, and Joss Whedon gave way too many shits about it.Ā
d) Itās not proven necessarily, but itās fairly obvious from context, that this conflict and the lack of creative control it represented is why Whedon left the franchise. In some sense I get that ā some directors donāt like someone else having that much control over the narrative ā but I think if you sign on for a franchise like the MCU, you have to know going in that your powers will be limited by the larger scope of the multi-film narrative. Ā
So the speculation comes into it where I believe that theĀ āmore farmhouseā Whedon wanted was to kill Clintās family. Whedon has a long tradition of motivating X character through the senseless death of Y character, stretching back to Jenny and Taraās deaths in BtVS, including highly climactic moments like Washās death in Firefly, and running on up through Coulsonās death in Avengers (Whedon was reportedly livid that they brought him back for AoS and has said in interviews that AoS is TV and therefore ādoesnāt countā). Admittedly I havenāt seen Dollhouse, but it seems to me that Whedon has trouble writing stories where someone doesnāt die in a senseless manner in order to motivate their loved ones. (His pissiness over his reputation for killing people, to me, is evidence that heās embarrassed his writing has stagnated so badly that he has to keep resorting to the same narrative tricks he was using fifteen years ago.)Ā
HEY EVERYONE HOW WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MEDIA CRITICISM FOR YOUR SATURDAY MORNING.Ā
Every other year I go searching for this exact post and have to do the shame of searching āJoss Whedon raging b*ner Marvel Ultimatesā in an effort to find it
On the one hand Iām genuinely sorry you have to search that, but on the other Iām vaguely proud to have produced a phrase so memorable that it actually helps you find the post. :D
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.
But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact):
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who ā when pressed ā have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.
Maybe.
(They're pretty sure.)
One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking":
Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again":
Or possibly from his "Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI," a stinging rebuttal to Thomas Ptacek's widely read "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts":
While those are important pieces of critical AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article:
[W]eāre facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains theyāve witnessed ā if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles.
Here are a few highlights from this morning's read ā moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a "holy shit" moment.
A person worked for a division that "pivoted" to re-engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only ten users had touched this expensive new technology, they "pivoted" again to support "agentic workflows." Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now."
Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted ā or even spared from being fired ā were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.
This has created a situation in which everyone ā "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" ā has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.
Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one ā we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively." Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem ā it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.
Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training date ā the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.
Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.
Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point.
Suresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT."
This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centered AI strategy for a $2b/year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life."
Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership." But many other people (especially nontechnical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything." As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private ā but you can't reason with a true believer.
The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff." But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.
As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.
Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards."
How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Suresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example: Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt-on called Cortex, that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate under ideal circumstances (that is, at least 8% of the time, it will mislead you, perhaps very badly).
Suresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgment, Suresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable.
To their credit, Hermit Tech refused to sell these customers Cortex, and stopped doing Cortex demos altogether. Suresh describes the experience of "the total 180Ā°, that shift from ice-cold to red-hot buying frenzy" as "deeply unsettling." What's more, the Cortex demos that Suresh and co performed were, by his account, pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful, to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses.
This is the situation up and down the corporate org-chart. Suresh has a reader whose title is "Head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm who tells him "their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation." This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies that have publicly announced "100x" productivity gains, but who confessed to Suresh that nothing of the sort has happened.
Why did these companies make these claims? Because their customers were making the claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100x'ed its productivity with AI unless you, too had 100x'ed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar, with real consequences: "getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesnāt really matter to your organisationās mission is a great way to get fired."
With the state of the industry dominated by froth, lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying "totally gameable metrics such as 'money spent on AI'" as a means of evaluating employees and divisions.
Between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage, there is now a gigantic market for "AI solutions." At best these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake, with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be "procuring AI-enabled services" for the business.
This isn't a harmless frippery: contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made "sufficiently AI" to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse: every fake AI project that produces real results (because it's not really AI) adds credibility to the AI true believers, who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything, and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI.
Suresh ends his essay with a long section on how to "navigate AI mania" ā advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit, while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully, that isn't me.
Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?
I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal:
Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a Snowflake database. But (unlike Snowflake) Cortex is controlled via conversational, plain-language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company Snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back-sasses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it.
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" ā experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:
An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.
That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."
As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."
All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword-compliance dysfunctions from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions ā they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.
Coming from Central Europe, I love the term "Potemkin AI".
If anyone is nuts here, it's the people who, with a straight face, claim that AI works, and even more stupidly, that it works better than actual humans 100% of the time. Particularly when they say it But As A Bad Thingā¢.
Because that's pure unadulterated cult bullshit. The exact kind of cult bullshit that benefits nobody but Big Tech. Damien Walter pointed it out in his video essay.
When AI really changes something, it does so in a small, esoteric field, and only because someone with knowledge of what he intends to apply it to knows what he's doing. Corridor Digital figured out how to make an advanced greenscreen keyer using generative AI and make it run on a gaming PC (that, coincidentally, also has enough processing power for HD video editing). It doesn't promise to disrupt the market for anything, so your average Business Idiot isn't interested in it.
Speaking as a lit major, the whole thing reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes". The leader has been presented with what seems like a good-faith project, and because of the "don't question this" rules nobody in the chain of command can object--even when those outside are yelling at them to stop.
there should be an episode of mob psycho where an orchestra somewhere is panicking because their conductor has been killed by an evil spirit and reigan shows up thinking he and mob would exorcise the spirit but mob doesnt show up for his own reasons so reigan calls him while standing in front of the orchestra. Mob doesnāt answer so reigan goes on to leave him a very long voicemail explaining the situation but while hes doing so, all his hand movements make the orchestra think hes the replacement conductor. And so they start playing to his hand movements which results in a shockingly stunning and unique performance from this orchestra. People talk about it forever. It goes down in history as a moment that changed music forever etc etc
Google quietly added generative AI capabilities to Google Earth, allowing anyone to generate false images on top of real satellite imagery. It seems pretty rudimentary, but the potential for disinformation is sky-high.
Anyway, did y'all hear that they nuked the White House?
Within the first few hours of its discovery, people on Twitter used this tool to generate an Epstein Island attraction at Disneyland, a mega-prison within Googleās headquarters, and a sequel to 9/11.
Google has already announced that they will be ārolling backā this feature because of screenshots like these:
The fact that they want to bring it back with āguardrailsā is ridiculous. Screenshots like these are not the work of some malign actors, theyāre instant proof that your idea is terrible on its face
I keep seeing people use free AI detection websites as evidence in AI witch hunts.
These websites are often scams. They use AI to detect AI. They rarely disclose their methods. They are typically only reliable on obvious material and are no better than a coin flip on content that is more challenging (which is usually when AI detection is needed most).
You'll even note that these websites do not give you a strict yes or no. They give you a percentage of confidence. Yes, it is true that human forensic analysis often has a confidence rating instead of an absolute certainty. But in this case, this gives these websites cover for when they create false positives. They don't tell you their actual success rate of detecting AI, so if you get a bad result, they can just say the tool was only 80% confident.
Even laboratory-grade forensic tools struggle to get above 70-80% accuracy, and staying ahead of AI improvements to maintain that accuracy is a constant struggle.
The best forensic analysis of AI media always has a human component. They use detection software in combination with human experts. There is no reliable, fully automated process. Especially now that people are combining AI with traditional techniques. They might generate an AI image and then use Photoshop to add noise, resize it, change the color and contrast. 5 minutes of work can remove the classic signs of AI that many of these detectors look for.
If you are suspicious of something and you want to use one of these tools as an initial indicator that you should seek out more evidence, I feel that is their only real use case. Like, it should be step one of a multistep process of investigation and it should not be your only evidence. In fact, you should not include it as evidence when making an accusation.
Look for creation dates. Look for provenance. Look at the artist's other work. Look for process videos.
But if you use the result of an AI detector to confidently say something is AI, you could very well hurt an artist using a dubious tool that consistently spits out false positives.
Or you could abstain from these high-effort, individual witch hunts altogether and focus your AI advocacy on the larger issues and the people in charge of these companies.
I'm guessing Google has one of the most advanced AI detection tools in the world. But this process cannot be 100% automated or else it will continue to hurt artists.
Google has long refused to hire actual humans to assist their automated processes. If a small YouTube channel needs help, they can rarely reach an actual human being. You need millions of subscribers for the privilege of not dealing with some sort of bot.
And they are smart enough to realize that AI slop hurts their platform, but they throw AI at the AI slop, and continue the tradition of not adding human labor to the mix. It is bonkers that they don't even inform people they have been flagged as AI. You just have to figure it out through deductive reasoning.
Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all.
(The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.
and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"
gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"
my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."
gallerist: "that isn't true."
and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.
so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.
'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then
i do think what gets ignored about carrie as a character is that sheās an incredibly easy target to bully; sheās a chubby, sheltered acne ridden teenage girl who wears frumpy grandma clothes and regurgitates the jesus freak shit her violently abusive mother tells her. she has violent thoughts about her classmates and is uncomfortable to be around. sheās far more interesting being a victim thatās somewhat uncomfortable to be in the head of than a tragic waif. sheās not a martyr, sheās a child and a child whoās been victimised her whole life shouldnāt have to be kind and angelic to be recognised as a victim. suffering teenage girls shouldnāt just be presented on screen as toned down glamorous thin ophelias, suffering teenage girls can be fat and poor and think violently. i do think we need to examine why culturally we need teenage girls to be beautiful and kind to valorise their suffering and treat it as bad
That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:
1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.
2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.
3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.
4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ā80s/early ā90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.
And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?
That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:
(As he goes on to say, heās never worked in animation againāheās effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)
Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin āFeet Manā Tarantino.
When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didnāt actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvinās skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jacksonās hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than heād expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.
The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (Iām not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and āworkingā for another few hours on a second, ātoned-downā version, and it worked every time.
The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isnāt some extant physical rubrick of what is and isnāt acceptable, itās the idea that they can have absolute power over someone elseās creative work. Itās about the social dominance of the interaction.
There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.
