I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.
If you go to Brazil, for example, there's zero worry about American music. Brazilian music holds its own, and then some. If you go to India, their domestic cinema is obviously thriving.
Nobody's "pushing" American media on consumers around the world. Cultural imperialism is ultimately a false narrative -- consumers pick the things they like, as they should because that's their free choice. Switching the TV channel or the radio dial is the easiest thing ever.
And if you think that there should be more support for their producers to compete with Hollywood budgets: Have you watched the credits of any European film or TV production recently? There are lots of government funds (EU and national/local) being spent on just that.
Also, Netflix has probably done more for both the funding and international distribution of European TV shows than all European streaming services combined.
I would argue that the US (and perhaps some other English-speaking countries) need more cultural diversity imported from other parts of the world.
Many Americans are unaware because they have not traveled outside of the US nor have they studied other languages, cultures, music, etc.
The Internet and the growth of global media has helped, but it's not the same as going to another place and meeting the people there.
In my country, immediately after the last US backed coup, the new 'democratic' government literally ditched French and German for foreign language education from all education institutions and pushed English in every level of education. As a result, I, like millions of youth in my generation, had to learn English as a foreign language. At this point it must be noted that a decent amount of the coup leaders were military men who received additional training in the US, 'School of Americas' style.
In addition to that, the US-backed government first jailed or banned all the artists who used to create content in national, traditional formats, and instead promoted literally American music - one reason for this was the majority of those artists were left-wing, pro-people artists who opposed US corporate interests so they were detrimental to the 'new order'. Those who were not banned refused to appear in state-run channels in protest. Naturally private channels also excluded them because they were seen as 'hostile' to privatization and other US-backed policies. What was left of the creative space was wiped out by private TV and radio channels who were founded by US-friendly capital or direct US-connected investments, run by those who were educated in Angloamerican institutions, pushing either directly American artists or their imitators. It was a literal takeover of an entire country's culture.
Result? Literally a decade of uncontested American movies, series, songs in tv and radio and recorded medium, culturally imperializing around two generations and slapping a weird layer of 'American' on top of their actual cultural identity. These generations still did not recover from this cultural rape, and they are unable to fit in in their own society, leave aside anywhere abroad.
This is what happened in every other US-backed regime. Even in Europe, US-backed parties and capital literally Americanized their societies methodically by either through the local friendly capital or literally US-linked interests buying out local channels. Even in the country that I now live in, the biggest media group is still owned by a corporation that is owned by an American-German dual citizen. Leaving aside it pushes entirely American content with a few national ones sprinkled in, the news that it shoves into its programming is literally US corporate news, pushing literally the policies of the US itself.
You would think that this would be something related to the US foreign policy, mostly affecting people abroad. It was not. It was a concerted, persistent policy that targeted Americans at home as well as it targeted foreigners.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
The 1971 US Chamber of Commerce Lewis-Powell memo said that the then-existing popular movements like the antiwar movement etc were pushing Americans away from the 'American way of life'. And the rich who own the media and education corporations should use their corporations to condition the people back into 'the American way'. The result is the concentrated, lying corporate propaganda machine that not only pushed wars like 2003 Iraq War, but also destroyed all the humane behaviors and traditions in the US to maximize corporate profit.
...
Then there is this thing about the monetization of entire world's resources that was started by Nixon, forcing everyone to trade in dollars and providing unending capital that was created from zero-interest money inflating everything in the US economy, leading to the corporate takeover of everything abroad by US interests as well as creating phenonenon like Silicon Valley and allowing business-model-free companies that ran on endless investor cash cornering all angles of the Internet and killing off their competition including the domestic independent players, forcing everything to revolve around Silicon Valley.
Which is precisely why many non-Americans here not only speak English aside from the above cultural imperialism reasons, but also post in this forum.
But no worries - as the zero-interest economy goes away, things will change.
Note that they also get a lot of subsidies from the local governments to film in their location. They are not doing it for charity.
Don't forget that Mercantilism and strict control of trade and information exchange was the rule until America forced "free trade" upon the world as a condition of entry into WW2.
We live in what is mathematically the exception, not the rule. The world didn't begin in 1945.
Still, I think in this case it's a synergy. I don't think something like "Dark" would have existed without Netflix, for example, nor would I be able to watch Belgian, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and many other productions in Europe or the US that easily.
> I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision.
Let me provide one:
A lot of Americans dont think that anyone could do a concerted, systematic sociopathy like the one I told in my post. Simply because they themselves wouldnt do such a thing, they think that those with whom they identify also wouldnt do that. Anything bad that happened to others or anything bad that is done by their establishment must be some 'coincidence' or a mistake.
This mentality is strengthened by two things: The Just World Theory and lingering Christian behavior patterns that still dominate the American public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The just world theory is utilized by people who need to escape reality to avoid cognitive dissonance. Because not doing so and acknowledging the evil and the evildoers in their own society would make living in that society very demoralizing and kill hopes for the future. So, any bad deed must have an explanation, any victim must have 'deserved' it, and everything must be alright with the world.
And lingering religious behavior patterns, because in Christianity, the Christian god and the faithful can do no wrong. They are the good ones. Whereas all evil is done by the unbelievers, heretics and other gods. This belief is translated to modern culture as 'being on the good side' whereas anyone else that is not 'with them' are evil. And so, Americans can do no evil whereas any evil can only be done by others. The manifestations of this can be seen in how every incident like the 2003 Iraq war is interpreted as 'a mistake', or 'an ill advised war', and in things like every US enemy being Hitler.
And these behavior patterns poison the minds of the well-intentioned Americans. Additionally a lot of Americans just flat-out keep the late 19th century manifest destiny white supremacist belief patterns - like how 'brown people' etc not being 'that important' and any bad thing happening in such countries being something unimportant even if it is done by their own establishment, hence it can be ignored.
But mainly, the obsession with being 'on the good side' and projecting every evil and ill to outside to escape cognitive dissonance totally poison the American mind and cause them to ignore even the biggest evils that are being committed in their own society - like how their country kills its own people if they cant pay for healthcare and so on....
I can't think of any industry that is more merit-driven than entertainment, and never more so than today -- both in terms of creation and distribution. A good movie is a good movie period. No amount of advertising and promotion can make people go watch a flop.
- San Francisco housing crisis: This has been a frequent topic of discussion on HN but I don't think many people outside of San Francisco, let alone outside of USA care a lot about this
- The collapse of silicon valley bank was a huge topic on HN but it was more or less non-existent in the news in my country
- Posts about US politics, such as anything related to Trump or the American Supreme Court
- When a post is specific to a particular country, it's usually indicated in the title, except in the case of the USA
Cultural exports and cultural homogenisation isn't imperialism. There is nothing in common between this, and when a country actually colonised another country and forced it to adopt its language (or indirectly forced it via neocolonial measures). One is voluntary adoption, the other is colonisation. So stop using concept creep in order to push a rhetorical point.
What we're seeing is largely the natural outcome of having a superpower economy, having communications technology, flight technology, free trade, etc. All this openness and integration coalesce to cause smaller countries to want to voluntarily adopt the status symbols, norms and entertainment of bigger countries that are culturally adjacent to them already.
Your argument structure is basically "this thing is really bad because I'm going to label it as really bad via concept creep, therefore it's good when far-right authoritarian measure X is implemented, even though X won't work at stopping really bad thing and much more extreme measures will be needed".
this marketiziation and individualism is as much a product of Anglosphere culture as the English language itself. It's kind of hilarious to demand that the only legitimate way for Italy to defend its culture is in the most American way possible, through the ideology of 'the customer is king'.
There's nothing strange about a society collectively, through governance, deciding how a nation's culture should be shaped, what an appropriate way of life is. It's how most societies on this planet operate.
Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants have shaped a lot of our urban culture. Before Irish and German immigration exploded, the US was a whisky country, then it switched to beer. Germans introduced social institutions like kindergarten and fraternal societies that included the working classes (which eventually evolved into things like the American Legion) and of course workers’ unions. The three cultures greatly changed the religious makeup of the US from one dominated by British Protestantism to a pluralistic mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The US is the primary home of the world’s Jewish people (we have more Jewish people than Israel and the rest of the world combined, if you include mixed/secular Jews), and Jewish immigrants kickstarted the US’ involvement in industries like international banking and some kinds of manufacturing. Plus Jewish people have been hugely important in making US tertiary education and research some of the best in the world. Before these three groups immigrated, the US was agrarian and pretty homogenous, and these groups pushed the US towards cultural pluralism and assimilation.
In the modern day, Asian and Hispanic immigration are mixing things up too. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally I think Asian women are much more likely than other women to pursue careers in STEM, which has done a lot to make formerly male dominated jobs more gender inclusive. Spanish is basically a de facto co-official language in many areas. Americans outside these cultures are beginning to adopt multigenerational living (also because of cost of living) which is likely influenced by both of these. In almost all Asian countries, savings habits are very different than the default in the US, and I think you can see the effects of this in US areas with high numbers of Asian immigrants in things like property prices or a focus on value (like stores with lower margins and less marketing).
Basically none of these groups have been large enough to subsume American culture, but they’ve all contributed pieces on top of the base of Anglo Protestantism and culturally/actually genocided West Africans. And the sheer number of disparate immigrant groups have made the US the pluralistic society it is today, which is likely a big factor into why American culture easily exports to the rest of the world.
This of course is caught up in the American conflation of religion and patriotism. It is taught that America is god's preferred country, evidenced by American global hegemony proving god is on America's side. One day of the week American children might pray in church, but five days a week American children swear their allegiance to the flag in a group ritual run by government schools, very often with the "one nation, under god" clause taught to them by their teachers. The few children who resist this group ritual will often be mocked by their peers and chewed out by their teachers.
It’s a high bar to put capitalism (plus an obsolete concept and handwavy other things) as what immigrants need to overturn to have been considered influential to US culture, since in a lot of cases that is precisely what brings them to the country to begin with, and is like the main thing the US is known for.