Can you imagine if, starting in about 1930, since film had been around for a while already, anyone who decided to write about film and try to redefine it was shouted down?
I just got called out and tossed away as a flippant idiot for using “wrong terms” for describing Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality, because the industry had already decided upon terms.
Which, BTW, was my point. The whole piece was about reworking and redefining the terms to better match a necessary longer term concrete implementation that is becoming obvious. It’s premised on the idea that we’re myopic and will do well to effort to be otherwise.
Just because a bunch of over-funded schmucks and bro-grammers in Silicon Valley decided what a term means and what the future will be, doesn’t mean they’re not absolutely 100% dead wrong. Especially for a type of digital media that barely existed 5 years ago. In truth, VR has existed for decades. It was made popular property of the zeitgeist again about 5 years ago. But now, it’s all figured out? All terms are in stone?
Film was almost completely redefined by a bunch of guys with various and often questionable backgrounds writing in journals in the 50s. That’s over 50 years after the Lumiere brothers first widely commercialized film. That’s 10 years after Citizen Kane.
By the Valley’s mediocre hive-mind culture, everything was already figured out and termed. They had made Citizen Kane. That was proof it was all figured out.
By that assertion, Truffaut and his ilk should not have bothered to redefine the medium intellectually. They had no right. And they were being destructive and should have been shunned.
I don’t think so.
It is ridiculous to think that Silicon Valley got it right already. Just as it’s ridiculous to assume Truffaut got it absolutely right. Software design and art don’t work that way. They are ALWAYS open to being redefined.
I hate what we have become. I really do. It makes me want to go off and just read and not bother trying to make anything anymore. What’s the point when you’re going to have every mediocre mind backed by an oversized wallet try and force you to shut up?
The internet used to be populated by academics and the academically curious. But when the web became popular, the academic internet was completely overwhelmed by the masses as they flooded in. e.g. Twitter, the most anti-intellectual platform man has implemented at a global scale.
Most recently, the internet and tech industry has been dominated by the financial class.
All their ranting and raving about disruption and meritocracy merely distracts from the truth. Now, under the financiers, it becomes like everything else. It becomes a space dominated by oligarchs and their favored peasantry, whom they elevate to their side. They dominate and subvert the academic and the artist. Who in turn must subsist on scraps and maintain sanity under threat of ostracism.
What a sad thing this has all become.