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Bukhmanizer ◴[] No.43485838[source]
I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
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baazaa ◴[] No.43488436[source]
I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.

Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.

From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.

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bluescrn ◴[] No.43492581[source]
> Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more.

Even more glaring is TV shows, where you now get an 8-episode 'season' every 2-3 years rather than the old days of 20+ episode seasons every year, often non-stop for 5 or more years.

It's not so much about capability/competence as pushing production values to unsustainable levels. You could get away with much less expensive VFX, sets, and costume when filming in standard definition. Now every pixel is expected to look flawless at 4K.

Another more controversial factor is that everyone brings their politics/activism to work and injects them into everything that they do. Now everything has to be pushing for social change, nothing can just be entertainment for the sake of entertainment.

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1. ngetchell ◴[] No.43492755[source]
Is that a change? George Lucas certainly brought his politics around Vietnam to Star Wars. The 70s were a very radical and political time for movies
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2. dominicrose ◴[] No.43494248[source]
but Star wars didn't get a 1.8 rating on IMDB and the CGI was good for the time
3. alabastervlog ◴[] No.43494467[source]
Star Trek (1960s), MASH (1970s)—shit, the entire history of sitcoms that are regarded as decent-or-better is mostly just one fairly "political" series after another, going back to the earliest days of TV. I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads, and is by far the least-whiny. "Boo! Why is the elite-educated noble woman who's also already deeply involved in an armed resistance so much cleverer and more-effective and cool under pressure than our farmboy hick hero who's away from home for the first time and wallowing in a whole pile of recent trauma and grief, and this random flaky braggart scumbag they picked up?"

Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".

Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.

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4. havblue ◴[] No.43494703[source]
Saying that Stormtroopers are bad or that the Vietnam war was bad isn't really that controversial or partisan.
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5. bluescrn ◴[] No.43495007[source]
> I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads

Compare+contrast with 'The Last Jedi'. Turning the male characters into total idiots and sending them off on a massive wild goose chase, before the day is saved by completely breaking the physics of the Star Wars universe, making all the previous heroes look like idiots for not using a relativistic kill vehicle against the Death Star!

I don't remember hearing any complaining about strong female characters in the era of Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Major Kira, Susan Ivanova, and so on.

6. bigstrat2003 ◴[] No.43496453[source]
What has changed is not so much that writers' work is influenced by their politics. As you said, that has always been the case. What has changed is that writers these days don't recognize that their work needs to be a good work of art first, and a way to express their views second. They lack any skill in subtlety or nuance, so the work becomes little more than a soapbox for the writer that is off-putting to all but the most ideologically aligned audience.

I like to use Star Trek in the 90s as a good example of what I mean. While there are episodes where the writers got preachy (they're only human I suppose), most of the time the writers were very careful to not openly take sides on the issues they raised. Even if you got the sense that the writer for an episode might feel a certain way about the topic, the characters wouldn't tell the audience how to feel. They didn't call other characters who disagreed with them names. They didn't just bully their way to victory in the story. The topics were treated as complicated issues where reasonable adults could disagree.

Compare that to shows/movies/books today. The writers treat the story primarily as a vehicle to express their opinions on issues. They have characters tell people "this is how a decent person behaves", with the understanding that the message is really meant for the audience. They have characters who agree with them call their opponents bigots or worse insults. They portray said opponents as villains or morons who only hold their beliefs because of how evil/stupid they are. They have the "good guys" run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with them, and they get to win despite their bad behavior. And often, the writers (and even other people involved like actors) will openly express their contempt for their audience when speaking about the work. They pick fights where none needed to happen, saying stuff like "if you don't like this then I don't want you as an audience member anyway". They are, in short, bad writers who don't have the skill to successfully let their social views influence their work.

The result of all this is that these writers don't succeed at persuading anyone. In years past writers could actually make progress on advancing the things they believed in because they had the wisdom to not openly preach to people and call them names. They respected people enough to let them draw their own conclusions, and as a result were successful. But writers today aren't good enough to persuade people to continue breathing, let alone something more controversial than that.

There is also an uptick in how much politics get forced into art, with people trying to claim "everything is political" and the like. But that isn't nearly as big a factor as how bad today's artists are at using political themes in their work.

7. ozmodiar ◴[] No.43498610[source]
Maybe not now. I wasn't alive for the Vietnam war but I remember saying anything bad about the Iraq war 2 was a quick way to get fired and a bunch of death threats for a few years. Now things have flipped, but you've got to keep in mind that attitudes change and people like to pretend they never supported viewpoints that have become unpopular.