Wednesday, October 7, 2020

There's Just Too Much Noise...

Another week it happens. Some piece of (possible) fuckery goes on in another hobby I enjoy and the Internet websites and Social Media houses that touch that particular jaunt of mine collectively lost their minds. In this case it was the most recurrent of hobbies in my life, Magic: the Gathering, as Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the makers of Magic, announced that they were going to publish a made to order box set with a limited ordering window featuring The Walking Dead crossover cards, that would present mechanics unique to only these cards and have art based off the characters on the television show. The takes, expectedly, were hot and heavy. 

This was the end of the game. Well, it wasn't the end of the game but it was another couple feet of growing circumference to a snowball WotC kicked downhill when a couple years back they made unique cards only achieved by buying a box of the newest expansion set to their product line. Well, okay, maybe it's not even so much as a slippery slope as it's just uber greedy capitalism at work making a product people felt like they needed to order anyway just to be safe that if they needed these cards down the road and they got prohibitively expensive in the interim by their limited nature. And then, well, what's even the problem with these cards being expensive and limited, there's Magic cards that are highly expensive because of their supply just being THAT outpaced by demand all the time and the fanbase just accepts those as part of the game, so why not these ones? And then that led to asking why we're complaining about these limited cards when there is an entire subset of Magic cards called the "Reserved List" that WotC promised not to ever reprint again (long story) and because of that and how old these cards are by now (twenty-plus years), some are the price of a mortgage payment, if not more, and we've come to accept that as a part of the game, so why not this? Cries for boycotts, cries of quitting the game, cries for firings for those that okayed this product and that have been pushing cards and products for a few years now that many feel have made playing the game a frustrating and turbulent endeavor. On and on and on it went for this past week and, while most of these positions did indeed have some slivers of merit and/or truth to them, it all became so apparent that our ability to hold onto a point or to embrace a life preserver of saliency in a tossing sea of constant turmoil is next to nonexistent, even when just discussing the things we overall ENJOY as a community. 

I know, I know. "Welcome to the Internet, old man." I more than get it. I stopped reading the comments ages ago because I knew to endure them was to watch a descent into madness and pain, but I think we're just administering to ourselves a new level of self-harm with how we interact over, well, everything, but especially things we "love." As I was demonstrating above with this most recent Magic-related outrage, it's not that valid points weren't being brought up, it's that a point was brought up and then someone would go "yeah but" and then someone would move onto a "well, how about this" AND THEN someone would say "well what about this tertiarily related thing that's a good point but not exactly on the matter at hand" and then a completely contrarian viewpoint would be aimed at the whole fracas for the sole purpose of adding more chaos.  All the saliency in the world doesn't mean a lick of nothing if we just "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" (to reference an old Simpsons gag) out way out of any sort of relevant discussion when an event occurs, a decision is made, whatever the case is, and we spend the equivalent amount of time to a goldfish's memory of taking a shit before we yell over each other and lose all focus. 

Like, that's the thing about it that kind of astounds me, we blow through our outrage and hot take counterpoints so fast that even the trolls and shitposters can't get in on the action. Nevermind not reading the comments for takes so inane and ignorant they may as well come from a Presidential Daily Press Briefing, you're lucky to get three threads in before even the commentary from proven community leaders - whatever that means anymore - is either burned at the stake by the group or sounds as conspiracy theory laden as a QAnon Sub-Reddit. And that little jab in that last sentence at "influencers" or what have you is there for a reason, because one of the reasons, in my opinion, that we have reached such levels of disarray is that these "discussions" (if you can call them that), these debates, these hot takes, insipid takes, troll takes, non-takes, and on on and on, happen in a vacuum absent of the people making these decisions because a) the influencers do their work for them by being either the leader or target taking the bullet for the media teams and b) absolutely NONE of this shit means anything to the executives at the top who only care if their business calls result in the money making machine go "brrrr." They don't care about the noise unless it finally overwhelms the almighty dollar blower. 

That point A above, as much as I cannot reiterate how the cynicism innate to modern late-stage Capitalism will kill us all shortly after it kills the things we love first, is probably the greater culprit more than anything. PR management has been relegated to the hands of people who have become lucky enough to have jobs that actually pay their bills in hobbies they enjoy because their personalities, antics, enthusiasm, hot takes, whatever, have led to an Internet presence that affords them that ability. Some are honest people who genuinely care about the medium or game they are commentating on. They love movies or comic books or Magic cards and are over the moon they are making money touching that entertainment form. But that also means they have an agenda, no matter how altruistic they may think they are being when they upload a YouTube video or shoot off a series of tweets. 

Controversy means clicks, clicks mean prominence and money. It really is that, simply. Even if you swear your clicks are coming from a reasonable and measured place, turmoil pays. Because that's a big aspect of being an "influencer," you're not there to be objective, this isn't journalism (in which objectivism was stabbed ten times in the face and buried in a shallow grave back in the 80's anyway), you're there to shill, whether it's actual pertinent points for a challenge to a hobby you love or just whatever noise you can supply to get through the day so you can get back to the perks of a career path that got you making clips of, I dunno, applying make up for the 'Gram for a million followers, not applying it at the counter of what few retail outlets remain for a buck more than minimum wage. Fuck, I'm doing it right now. There's thirty of you folks, probably bots, that click this pile of run on sentences any time I put one up. And I truly, genuinely take time to talk about hobbies I like in this space because I find it a nice outlet since I don't have as many real world conversations about them, but I openly admit it would be cool if these diatribes became a thing more people came to see because I a) want to discuss my hobbies with people in a space that isn't 280 characters at a time and b) I would like things to get to a point where at the least something like this became popular enough to get some income from it all, probably to fund said hobbies. And coming from my experience of writing thousands of words at a time about comic books for over a decade elsewhere, I can tell you firsthand that being a louder voice participating in the noise is what keeps the churn going. Controversy pays (even though I didn't make a cent doing that old gig) because it's always easiest to go with the fresh object of community excitement/ire. 

And like I said before, you can move up into that "voice of the community" because the people who would usually be losing their minds in boardrooms to perfect messaging are instead more than happy to let the person who makes their money grabbing clicks take the line of fire because that's just the deal. The noise feeds itself because there's no one at the company responsible for yelling over it with a megaphone. Or when they do it's "community outreach" it's basically to keep just enough of the torches away from them because they know they'll just be rekindled in the direction of some sort of new shitstorm a week later. Ultimately, as I mentioned before as well, if the product keeps selling and the shareholders are happy and therefore the CEOs that are above most noise that doesn't come from a regulatory body anyway, then this is just how things are going to work going forward. What's even worse is that as much as I wanted to keep this more just a running commentary on things that I love, this is really the blueprint for discourse in America in general for all things. Every day there's something new and on the range from "annoying and overblown" to "holy shit how is this reality and why is it not being addressed by goddamned anyone?" and nothing really changes because the public gets tired and the people who only care about a payday keep on cashing those checks and capital gains. But I digress.

I apologize that all that mess was definitely more a "stream of thought" type ramble, but I thought it kind of fitting. It's just frustrating because it's a broken system with broken people just wading through broken products to enjoy a few their hobby at the end of a broken day of work. The worst of it all is two-fold; no one is innocent and it also renders us impotent to maintain a proper, actually justified level of outrage when an atrocious enough of a situation arises to deserve it. Not only are there no real "innocent" commentators out there because even the best examples of "good faith" commentators are still pouring gasoline on fires simply by addressing the subject matter tearing at a community at the moment, but when something horrific happens that tendency to go from "well this" to "well that" to "how about such and such" still corrupts much needed positive attention.

Earlier this year there were "Speaking Out" movements in two other hobbies I adore; comic books and pro wrestling. Now, I get that those things always get messy because at the end of the day it's a matter of accusing and the accused, but I think the mess comes from more of the point I've been beating at this whole time. I get that sometimes, unfortunately Accusers are liars, or that at the end of the day sometimes the Accused are so beloved they're teflon to the accusations. That's a mess that also involves the "Court of Public Opinion," employers of all of the above, law enforcement, judicial systems, etc. But, what I do think needs to happen is that these things need to NOT BE GODDAMN FORGOTTEN IN JUST A MATTER OF WEEKS, but we have rendered ourselves just so tired of all the noise that essentially that's what happened in both cases. Sure, some people did get good and messed up right off that bat. There were such an overwhelming amount of women speaking up at certain wrestlers (like Joey Ryan) or people in the comics biz (like Dark Horse editor/writer Scott Allie) that the axe fell on them swift and hard. But in a lot of cases there was some damage control, some suspensions, some "heartfelt" apologies issued and self-exiling, and then... eh? 

Worst of all this is that I'm nearing something like two thousand words on this stream of whatever the fuck and it's not like I have a solution. My solution is really just writing this, hoping I don't sound like an out of touch or off base asshole and hoping it means something to whoever reads it. Ideally, deeper and more meaningful discussion is a good prescription as long as it keeps getting refilled, over and over again to overwhelmed a decent amount of the rabbling, but the rapid barrage that overwhelms a communal issue from the get go will still drag long prose like this down. And it's just simply how we work now as a society; this is were the Internet has brought us, for better or for worse. It's made finding a home to discuss and share our interests and likes and what makes us happy one of the simplest things in the world as long as you have a connection, but it also made fandom chatter explode into a cacophony of disarray and vitriol when even the slightest bit of ire is raised in said communities. I don't know what the solution is, hell, I'm not even sure I've made an overall point now as I stumble to wrap this up, but I hope whatever this weird exercise was prompted whoever out there bothered to read it to think maybe a little more civil, maybe a little less reactionary, and maybe to share it amongst their peers so at some point a man can possibly make like five bucks off of the metrics.

Also, yeah, I'm going to duck out of these kind of "state of things" pieces I've drawn myself into writing (like I said, they're "easy") and I think I'm ready to just talk comic books for a bit. They're what I did for thirteen years, quarantine has given me the ability to put some time with them again under my belt, and they've been my primary hobby, no exceptions, for twenty years now. Time to give them the proper amount of love and attention over hot messes like everything above. Cheers...



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