Feeling a bit grumpy about various things at the moment, so I want to set things down just to be clear, when this whole shithouse burns down, that I was not on board.

Our culture has been dumbed down over the past 25 years due to a number of factors.

Because the internet was, inevitably, first adopted by tech nerds, the culture of the internet exists within the narrow comfort zones of said nerds*. So the humble comic book, which was in the past the acquired taste of a narrow coterie of reluctant readers, has come to have an outsized influence on modern life – in the film industry, especially, and increasingly on television.

These narratives are repetitive, derivative and witless. The debates around representation in these narratives, increasingly a part of every day discourse, are still debates about texts which are repetitive, derivative and witless. Black Panther may be lauded for its representation of people of colour, but it’s still a stupid movie based on a stupid comic book. Wonder Woman may have a woman in a lead role, but it’s still a stupid (overlong) movie based on a comic book. All of these movies, every single one of them, are bloated, loud and dull, wallpaper for the mind. So stuff gets smashed up, so what?

And these debates about representation? They were a creation of the narrow white bread world of these shitty properties in the first place.

And because these early adopters of the internet, 25 and more years ago, were of a certain age, and because their cultural and personal development was arrested when they got interested in “computer stuff”, they were obsessed with Star Wars. If you were ten years old in 1977, the year of that film’s release, you were at college when the first personal computer revolution started, and primed to get onto the pre-WWW internet by the time you graduated. And you have continued to bore the rest of us with your Star Wars obsession ever since. Let’s be clear: every single second of the interminable Star Wars franchise is as dumb as and has all the charm of a septic tank full of turds.

Watch another film, for fucksake.

Harry Potter? Read a different fucking book.

Lego? You’re too old for toys: grow up. And only idiots call it legos.

Everything wrought by this generation is loud and stupid and colourful. Video games. A whole industry devoted to creating landfill in the form of obsolete consoles and plastic packaging. A whole generation lost to stupid, simplistic narratives. And what do we get at the end of it? Trump. Brexit. Simplistic narratives.

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*I almost wrote geeks, because the implication of nerd is that there is some intelligence behind the obsessiveness, whereas a geek doesn’t even have that going for them; but I must be feeling charitable.