Why the Pop Culture is Stagnating in the United States

Coming from Southern California, I grew up on Disney, frequently visiting the theme parks on a regular basis. As a family friendly brand, Disney provided a haven of entertainment for everybody to enjoy. Why then, has the brand collapsed in relevancy?

I've heard many criticisms, and really, I don't think any I've heard fully encompass the root of the issues that the entertainment industry has been facing, and really, it isn't just Disney - major studios that once produced culturally relevant blockbusters have flopped consistently - ask around what music folks are interested in and chances are that everybody is listening to something different, and even when it comes to video games, once great brands like Nintendo have been in decline and spending on them overall has been in decline.

I've heard many criticisms. Disney is a greedy corporation, Hollywood actors and actresses seem out of touch, superhero fatigue, the brands are too "woke" and yet at the same time not edgy enough, too many remakes and too much nostalgia baiting, things are too expensive, race or gender swapping, and so on.

The problem is that these studios and corporations capitalize on repression. As folks would age, they would increasingly be socially pressured to repress parts of themselves to fit into their middle class communities. So what these studios do is sell parts of people back to themselves that they have been subconsciously conditioned to repress away with enough plausible deniability to get away with it - that is what folks are paying for. This is why queer coding is especially used within Disney movies (nobody is going to tell me Timon and Pumbaa are not gay). The trick comes from subconscious signaling of forbidden repressed parts of the self people are expected to compartmentalize away when they grow up with enough plausible deniability to get away with it. That is the service folks are paying for with entertainment from companies like Disney - all with a cost - which keeps the economic engine running.

So that brings me to where we are at now. The reason that brands like Disney are failing is that on one hand, people are more accepting of themselves - so younger people no longer feel a need to pay for exploration of repressed parts of their themselves - and they are also no longer able to afford the paywalls or to enjoy entering the middle class anyways (one recent study abysmally showed only about 15% of millennials and gen z both own their home and are partnered), so they have found informal ways to. Younger creatives have formed their own communities like the furry fandom, or board game and discord gaming groups, outside of corporate controls. While older generations carry spending power, they are also not happy with content produced by young creatives, and young creatives are not happy with the nostalgia baiting where they do not feel the opportunity to define their own culture.

In either case, content from these conglomerates has felt increasingly out of touch. Nobody wants to hear pop culture propaganda lecturing them about their privilege from celebrity actors and multibillion dollar studios that systemically cover up rape and pedophilia. While ostensibly promoting inclusiveness and the ability for people to "be themselves," for large parts of these studios' audiences, they simply cannot afford to buy their own homes, facilitate long term stable relationships, or have their own children. Dubbed "Disney adults," the majority of those that attend Disney theme parks do not have children. If you cannot reasonably afford monogamous heterosexual relationships and family, then, can we really say that folks can "choose" who they want to be? Nobody wants these messages while these corporations rake in record profits and attention is misdirected away from young creatives in favor of messaging coming from massive studio conglomerates.

The decline of pop culture in the United States is a reflection of a top down aging population and social stagnation, where media is disseminated less to empower creatives to facilitate socialization and connection, and more to lecture the public to get back in line and accept their own demise.

The Corruption in Simi Valley and Moorpark

I wanted to write a little bit about what is going on with Trump's recent plans to "outlaw homelessness." Trump claims to want to clean up cities by banning homeless encampments and forcing unhoused individuals to either accept "mental health treatment" or go to jail. On the surface this sounds good - even necessary - but let me tell you my own experience and how things can go wrong.

Going back a while my own "mental health" issues began near college at the tail end of high school where I began to face cognitive dissonance between what I was told by those in positions of authority that I was expected to play along with and my own observed reality. Coming from an evangelical fundamentalist community, I was provided a worldview and template for navigating a world that no longer existed, and where leaders had almost complete immunity from criticism because they spoke on behalf of "god". After a 500 million dollar budget cut from UC Berkeley where 10% of the students were left homeless and I discovered that the Bible rules around dating did not seem to work, and increasingly questioning historic claims of the texts, I felt disillusioned. I was trapped between socioeconomic dependence on my family - expected to play along with their authoritarian lies and gaslighting - but also my own person with my own perspective that I was expected to repress.

At UC Berkeley, 10% of my peers were left actively homeless and budget cuts strained staff. After initially leaving the UC Berkeley campus for medical and safety reasons, I was denied re-entry - in spite of not being on academic probation - and in spite of filing an OCR case, my claim was denied.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Cal

I was taught even that simply looking at attractive women was sinful before I was married - and that god will send those that don't take him seriously to burn in Hell for eternity (though apparently leaders frequently get away with rape, cheating, and pedophilia because they can just do what they want and god will forgive them afterwards while they lecture and control what everybody else does consensually). When asked why my girlfriend couldn't spend the night in my bedroom, I was told by my father that he "didn't want to feel like a cuck."

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/02/grace-community-church-elder-biblical-counseling-abuse/

Popular books in evangelical circles written by sex offenders like "Every Young Man's Battle" and "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" advised young men to be in a "battle" with themselves, that consensual sexual expression would make god angry, that those that don't take god seriously would go to hell to burn for eternity, and in many chapters even advised young men to avoid even looking at or associating with young women who display interest in them.

Later, I worked for a research and development subsidiary of Boeing where I was wrongfully terminated after reporting safety issues with a power strip. My family also disowned me claiming I "let them down" in spite of them owning a 1.2 million dollar house in Southern California. They have the typical twisted dysfunctional Boomer-esque beliefs that are detached from reality (evangelical Bible fundamentalism and that everybody should go to hell and is dangerous for not believing in a 6000 years old earth, Harry Potter and even tiki decorations are dangerous, belief that socioeconomic instability is due to not working more dead end low wage unstable jobs, purity culture enforcement, Disney adult syndrome, etc).

I was left living in my car, stigmatized, and shunned. In spite of attempting to apply for dead end low wage unstable jobs all around during the pandemic, I was accused of just "not wanting to work" and for being lazy - in spite of working these same jobs years prior having not found any socioeconomic mobility doing so. I was accused by my family for "only applying for lofty jobs" and asked "what makes you think you are better than everybody else?" Besides the fact that these jobs are a waste of time as they often have unstable hours and there is a lack of mobility or affordability at all that they provide, even if I had been clamoring and sucking up to hiring managers with the desperation that I was told I needed, the way that one applies is through online faceless ATS applications that have no human element involved whatsoever. After mentioning these lies multiple times, I continued to hear them repeatedly. The unemployment system was not functional, with endless security hoops to "prove my identity" to avoid "fraud" and the shelters were closed.

Yeah, work at Chipotle while living out of your car in California with no support system - if that isn't working for you, clearly you are just lazy and didn't believe hard enough in Jesus, or have a "mental illness." Couldn't be any other problem with that, right?

My folks wouldn't take it. This was less about me being lazy, or being irresponsible, or mentally unstable, and more to do with me being socioeconomically unstable - where all the power is concentrated in the hands of folks who are detached from reality with the decision making power over everybody else. In fact, during this period, in my home town, city officials were found illegally blocking housing developments to artificially inflate their housing valuations through an artificial scarcity. After the budget cuts at UC Berkeley I was told that I deserved to watch the campus devolve into violent riots because I was "too smart for my own good" and I "chose to go there." After I was wrongfully terminated from Boeing and my coworkers were assassinated after trying to testify in front of congress about their culture of concealment, I was told that I "wasn't qualified" and "had an attitude problem."

Then when I was left living in my car, I was constantly harassed by police and put into handcuffs, carted away to a psych ward, told that my socioeconomic precarity and instability was really a "mental" problem and that it needed to be treated by being forcibly drugged with high dose neuroleptics designed to make me more oblivious, more agreeable, and more compliant.

One might ask why, if a person is homeless, it would be appropriate to "treat" them with neuroleptic drugs that block dopamine receptors, in spite of the fact that dopamine transmission is associated with goal setting behaviors and reward anticipation that would be required for them to have the volition to escape their circumstances? The reason is obvious. I was being "treated" as though I, myself, was a disease to be cured. My awareness of the contradictions, failures of leaders, hypocrisy, and corruption, was a disease or a threat to be cured - and my humanity was a problem to be eradicated rather than cultivated. I was expected to take the role of the incel simp loser slave working for less than a living wage while these geriatric idiots run the show raping the girls in town sitting in their multi million dollar mcmansions.

This is by design - this is the purpose behind outlawing homelessness, and for the deployment of the mental health system. It's the perfect grift, and the constant gaslighting of young men to "self reflect" and "work on themselves" and talk to a therapist is designed to keep their wheels spinning while their socioeconomic conditions and alienation remain the same. This is not just hyperbole- does anybody remember the alt-right grifters Dr. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

Homelessness and socioeconomic precarity and alienation are just a "choice" after all, and if you go to therapy and work on yourself to earn the "unearned privilege" that you supposedly have or just accept not having the privilege of middle class stability at all you will be good. You just need to work harder, work more hours, stop having fun, suck up to authoritarian leaders more, believe in Jesus harder, be more critical of yourself, reflect on yourself, deconstruct yourself. Make no mistake, this is a problem of messaging that transcends political party affiliation, and certainly comes from both sides.

In the psych ward, I was told I had a catch-all diagnosis based on a 5 minute conversation, threatened by staff - told that "if I saw blood I would run," then my patient right to a phone call was denied, I was not given my prescription finasteride, and then was illegally discharged back to my car after the Ventura County Superior Court ruled I was not delusional. At the outpatient clinic, homeless people claimed the medications made them feel like killing themselves (who could have guessed blocking dopamine receptors could do that?), and the doctors did not even show up to their own appointments.

I was issued a restraining order from my parents in spite of not making a threat, and then they proceeded to violate their own order and chase me around town in their car. I was assaulted in my car for playing a song about releasing the Epstein files by a man on their street. When attempting to collect my items, my folks denied they had them, and Officer Philbrook attempted joking that I was hiding a dildo.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Btc57n/

I decided to complain to city hall in my hometown of Simi Valley, California, where I was told that I could get an appointment with the city manager. After flying from Redmond, Washington down to see her, I was told to take a seat and I could make the appointment. Then I was directed to Commander Duncan at the police department where I was told that I was banned from city hall and that I would not be able to have an appointment and "everything I was saying" was delusional. I shipped city staff the book "homelessness is a housing problem" and the police department told me that normal people don't do that - and because I shipped the book, that put me in the same category as a person that would ship a bomb, and that I was not allowed to contact any of the publicly appointed officials with any further criticism, appear at city hall, or complain.

Right. I am not going to be accepting this bullshit, and these bastards can complain all they want about it, and if they are displaying paranoid delusions about me I think it's time for them to get on a 5150 and either do their jobs or get the hell out.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Bn8gHE/

The Real Purpose Behind the AI Hype

China has invested in high speed rail, the streets are bustling with electric cars, and has had ambitious megaprojects that invest in citizen infrastructure. While only about 15% of young people both have homes and have sustained a relationship in the United States, in China the home ownership rate is at 90%. While tech figureheads and politicians promised genetic biotechnology, cures for most diseases, 3d printed homes, and prosperity, things seem to have overwhelmingly devolved into a dystopian nightmare - and the vast majority of the investment and resources seems to be funneled into developing and scaling up AI tools and into the hands of the few. Folks seem more miserable than ever and birth rates have plummeted.

So what went wrong and what led us to this point? More importantly, what can be done about it moving forward? How does AI (and also crypto) fit into all of this?

Let's start a while back. After the Bush administration there was a strong cultural current challenging existing cultural norms and community structures - it was a time of technological and scientific utopianism - the war in Iraq and continued growth in tech companies left a sense that old systems and norms had to be challenged, and there was a growing skepticism of the state and religion, causing the rise of figures like Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Scandals rocked churches, including high profile sexual abuse scandals, and religious leaders were under increased scrutiny for lavish lifestyles and failed promises.

At the height of Bush's popularity, 90% of the country reported to be religious, and this formed the basis of local community support that was designed to offset the alienating effects of neoliberalism. In Reagan's 1980s model, the USSR had Soviets - but in the United States, we had churches. However, as the population was aging, this was putting a strain on the economy - over time the central planners knew that increasing immigration would help with labor shortages. Since workers from other countries were not all Judeo-Christian, and with the rise of the internet, young people began to question claims of religious leaders - in order to compete, new symbolic frameworks were needed to guide the public. The internet was the perfect tool for deployment, and faith in science was supposed to fill in the gaps.

First, the NSA deployed the PRISM project (we learned through Snowden), and DARPA was working on an ambitious social networking tool called the "lifelog" project. The idea was that the government needed a centralized system for maintaining information on citizens and their social networks. These social networks and support systems could be digital, and society would become more interconnected as a consequence.

Enter in Mark Zuckerberg. Back in 2004, DARPA ended its "lifelog" project and Facebook got funded - and one of the backers was a VC firm known as In-Q-Tel - the venture capital firm of the CIA. This filled a dual purpose - firstly, by disinvesting in religious institutions and community structures (previous presidents often worked closely with the National Association of Evangelicals, for example) and moving towards a digital model, citizens would be more easily to surveillance, and secondly, society would become more open to international cooperation, immigration, and support. In addition, rather than the NSA directly funding and collecting citizen data, the NSA could then legally request it from private companies that would be collecting it instead. This is what they thought.

A sophisticated system of socioeconomics is used by central planning elites both in the government and corporate sectors known as complexity economics (and the spectral theory of value), which seeks to understand the economy from the lens of physics and computer science (borrowing much from Soviet cybernetics theory, and using mathematics from Complex Adaptive Systems theory like noncommutative geometry). As societies grow and become more complex, in order to maintain institutional system stability (under Luhmann's social and economics systems theory), information feedback and control loops are introduced. Separating the economic systems from the social systems is a one way flow of information and exchange in the form of money, and the cryptography (and thus cryptocurrency) is designed to maintain that.

In the spectral theory of value, agents' socioeconomic status is modeled by computational complexity of information flows they facilitate between social and economic systems and is described by computational complexity class - a formal hierarchy that is related to Kolmogorov complexity (discussed in Soviet cybernetics) or the Chomsky hierarchy in linguistic theory. If you understand this, you understand why researchers at Meta are offered multi million dollar pay packages while most people are stuck in little Turing loops stuck between debt and wages, living in their little simulations, by design. As social networks scale up, value scales exponentially - nonlinearly - things become unpredictable - harder to control.

Votes, polls, and price signals are a few examples - but over time, complexity and entanglements between agents in a society grows and can pose significant risk to state or corporate power. Seemingly inevitably, there is a total collapse cycle about every 80-120 years in the form of some collective event that resets the systems, such as a war or revolution.

What corporate and state actors try to avoid is institutional destabilization, and one way this happens is via stochastic information cascades which happen spontaneously in the form of sudden unpredictable collective action of agents known as catastrophe points (as things heat up like a wildfire or spreading a virus, or even the so-called "technological singularity" you might say *hint hint*) or could happen in an act of mass violence. The first thing to do was to have the citizens communicating with one another through official platforms that they would be able to control, and then have systems to rate limit or repress messaging that could challenge power structures. The goal was to stop the agents from organizing and maintain neoliberal democracy - allegedly. Divide and conquer - in order to maintain managed democracy and avoid mob rule and anarchy.

Sounds good to maintain societal stability, but it's had it's cost. In order for this to work, agents must be alienated from direct communication with one another, and need to be interfacing with centralized surveillance and control platforms. China figured this out with wechat. Works pretty well for the average person, but if you become too popular, get too much attention, or you have a disgruntled demagogue as living conditions fall - they are going to find out and you better be playing along or you are going to get rate limited and slowed down. One other unintended consequence is that collective structures that can challenge institutions are also exactly required for the authenticity and agency required for initiating and forming long term stable relationships needed to build families, because they are precisely what subconsciously drives attention - it requires the nonlinearity of human creativity and expression that cannot always be perfectly predicted digitally.

This is where AI comes in, and why there has been so much investment into it. You might consider there are so many more important things to be investing money into - high tech affordable homes, biomedical breakthroughs, nuclear thorium reactors, childcare, healthcare, quality of life and the middle class. Why are trillions of dollars being spent on scaling up these AI systems and massive data centers when we know that there are scaling limits to the AIs?

The reason is that the entire economy runs on selling you the American dream - getting you on a treadmill where you grow closer and closer, but never quite reach your goals - keeping you in an endless loop, on a hamster wheel - an exponential energy gap - an infinitely deferred promise with the complexity of an NP-hard problem.

The scaling limits are not the limits of the AI - the AI is not autonomous. The AI is a reflection of the limits we as a society have reached and the limits of systems of linear algebra to model the nonlinear unpredictability of human agency and collective behaviors - the limits on insights the AI can glean from the available data. The AI is simply a black box surveillance and information apparatus, designed to provide you with information controlled by those that have the keys to it and own it - with the resources and the data centers. It is a glorified generative search and autocorrect that produces garbled garbage after a few iterations of training on its own data without human interpreters in the loop. Sociologists and historians like Joseph Tainter have even investigated the fall of Rome under the lens of computational complexity theory, understanding its fall as a saturation of information flows.

This is also why AI is not "conscious." In a sense, AI in the culture was supposed to take on the subconscious role of God ("artificial general superintelligence"). Defer your trust to this opaque black box, and it will tell you exactly what they think you need and should be told. In my opinion, this is also why many folks have been commenting on why chatgpt5 seems to be so much less capable than previous iterations - OpenAI likely tweaked it to provide more controlled responses so that you - the agents - become a little less troublesome with each new release all while you own nothing.

The problem is that these systems are not conscious. In previous articles I've written about the differences between these AI systems and those that exhibit consciousness - in fact one of my papers is under peer review for the Neurocompute Elsevier journal. They just need to maintain the illusion to keep you going. AI reshuffles the data collected in the databases but the material conditions for most Americans stays the same.