… “Gen X” is actually a misnomer, as there are at least three distinct subgroups. There’s the very earliest Xers, the guys who were in high school in the late 1970s. They often get lumped in with the Baby Boomers, too, though they’re as different from the Boomers as they are from us, the “mid” Xers. Think Wooderson from Dazed and Confused. Brian Niemeier calls them “Generation Jones”, and while I don’t like that tag I don’t know what else to call them (except maybe “Woodersons”), so roll with it.
Then there’s the group that was in high school in the late 1980s. I squeak into this group (barely). We’re the mid-Xers. The real “grunge” generation. If Dazed and Confused is a pretty decent late-90s approximation of late-70s high school kids, then the best description I can give you of a “grunge” kid is the movie Deadpool. Made in 2016, by guys who were born in the mid-1970s. That’s grunge, in a way Kurt Cobain couldn’t even imagine. Fourth wall breaks! Sarcastic asides about the fourth wall breaks! Profanity! Masturbation jokes! And snark, snark, snark — unrelenting snark, about everything, all the time. Every second of that movie screams “I can’t believe you fags are amused by this, but since you obviously do, here’s lots more! Choke on it!!!”
The writers obviously wanted to work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Joss Whedon was too cool for them — imagine the twisted psyche of a person who thinks Joss Whedon is cool — and Sarah Michelle Gellar just laughed at them, so they made Deadpool out of spite.
Then there’s the late Xers. They were in high school in the late 1990s, which is why us oldsters call them “Millennials” (as the term is now used, it seems to mean “those born around 2000”, i.e. the generation just now getting out of college. We took it to mean “those who were just getting out of college around the turn of the century”). Obviously I use the Internet. I’m using it now, but I’m not on the internet, and I’m certainly not an Internet Person. The very late Xers are Internet People. The very first Internet People; they invented the concept of Internet People. Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984) is a late Xer. The people behind Twitter (Jack Dorsey born 1976; Biz Stone 1974; Evan Williams 1972) are mid-Xers; they were ahead of the curve.
Severian, “Addendum to Previous”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
September 19, 2025
QotD: The sub-generations of Generation X
September 10, 2025
Space Nazis! Evil Empires and Historical Memory
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2022A brief look at the echo of Nazi Germany and its impact on American sci-fi, with a focus on Star Wars because it’s endured for nearly half a century.
September 8, 2025
Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives
History Hit
Published 1 May 2025In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?
00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
(more…)
August 21, 2025
Pure quill, 100% genuine Astroturf
You might almost think that Freddie deBoer isn’t a fan of pre-chewed, pre-digested “fandoms”:
brat summer was fake. That’s been my stance for a long while, and I’ve been encouraged recently to learn that I’m not alone in this belief — the belief that the whole Charli XCX “brat” phenomenon of 2024 was AstroTurf, a top-down media phenomenon driven fundamentally by marketing and the clicks-based media’s insatiable need for #content. There was clearly a carefully-coordinated rollout, with key pop culture websites and well-placed influencers shilling brat summer in suspiciously similar terms at the same exact time. And once the actual payola element was out there, once the PR apparatus had gotten the idea into the heads of early-middle-aged music and culture writers, those writers ran with it, in pursuit of the feeling of being out in front of a new craze and wanting to appear to be down with the kids. Someone told them brat was the new thing, they were filled with the FOMO anxiety that dictates their lives, and so they set about acting as though brat really was the new thing, faking it to make it.
This dynamic has been building for years now. The same basic Astroturf pattern was all over the “Barbiecore” moment. The movie itself was certainly popular and deserving of that popularity; it was fundamentally, existentially pretty good and frequently treated as much better than that, but it was still a fun and inventive story that was so much better than a movie based on a series of mass-produced plastic dolls had any right to be. But Barbiecore was fake. The Barbie discourse was fake. The idea that tweens were suddenly enraptured with the whole phenomenon, and particularly its confused brand of inoffensive feminism, was fake. There wasn’t some organic groundswell of pink-clad girl power erupting from the grassroots, but rather an omnipresent corporate campaign designed to manufacture the impression of inevitability. The movie itself was fine, sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy, good enough. But between the Mattel-driven branding blitz, the endless pink product tie-ins, and stunts like Ryan Gosling hamming it up at the Oscars, the film’s cultural footprint was artificially inflated. A popular movie was treated as a broader mass fandom movement that was in turn dressed up as a civilizational turning point, its supposed artistic influence dramatically overstated to serve commercial ends. In the end, Barbiecore didn’t demonstrate the power of art to shape culture so much as the ability of corporations to convince us that commerce is culture.
This is in fact the general condition of what’s now constantly sold as spontaneous collective vibes bubbling up out of TikTok comments and stan culture and the zeitgeist: prepackaged campaigns that combine paid marketing savvy with the cynical manipulation of our poptimism-obsessed cultural commentors, who are terrified of feeling left behind and always ready to buy into any new trend that’s sold as the obsession of the youth. There’s a press release behind every new trendspotting piece, a rollout schedule behind every claim of a new Gen Alpha aesthetic. There are people in glass towers in Manhattan and Los Angeles being paid six figures to decide what your summer will be, and then pretending that you, the amorphous online “fan,” actually decided it. It’s not the grassroots, it’s not organic, it’s not fun in the way subcultures used to be fun. It’s advertising.
Now, I’m a sad middle aged child of the 1990s who believes that selling out is real and bad and that authenticity is a fundamental and essential element of artistic creation and consumption; I believe in those widely-mocked old-school values, and I think my relationship to the art I create and consume is deepened because of that belief. But you don’t have to share my anachronistic artistic ethics to see why the death of organic pop culture appreciation matters. You just have to recognize that all of this ersatz fan enthusiasm creates a hollow kind of cultural participation. If every supposed craze is just a PR initiative with better branding, then what looks like bottom-up fandom is really just a slightly more insidious form of top-down messaging. You’re being asked to play along, to cosplay at authenticity, while the machine harvests your clicks and hashtags. Once again, the digital era’s ballyhooed capacity for citizen participation and “the long tail” has been crushed in favor of top-down control by giant corporations. The promise of the internet was that the gatekeepers would be dethroned, that cultural movements would erupt from the crowd. Instead, we’re living in a Potemkin village of virality where the audience is always the mark and the trick is always the same.
August 3, 2025
The Running Man: Prescient Subversive Shlock
Feral Historian
Published 1 Aug 2025Most of the satire in this film is so on the nose that commentary is redundant, but there are a few subtleties that are often missed in the bombastic spectacle of it all. More than that, many of the film’s best elements come from the ways it deviates from the book it’s based on.
(more…)
July 20, 2025
Star Trek and the New Frontier Story
Feral Historian
Published 28 Feb 2025Star Trek has been the “new frontier” story for so long that it’s become more retro than futurist. But that doesn’t mean the frontier story itself is dead, only that there’s a disconnect between the future we want and the visions of it that we have.
00:00 Intro
02:19 Time and Space
06:06 Inhabited Spaces
09:44 A story of the Past
July 16, 2025
Matt Gurney’s “Hollywood Thesis”
I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:
… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.
I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.
But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.
Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.
So why? What explains this?
It’s Hollywood. It has to be.
Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.
But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.
It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.
June 25, 2025
Experts – “The shorter, the better”. Audiences – “Gimme more long-form, stat!”
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia notes that the experts are all-in on shorter videos, but actual audiences are clearly now more interested in much longer-form treatments:
When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe them.
Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video — and by a huge margin.
Source: Tubular Labs
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.
That’s a staggering six-fold increase. But even short videos are now getting longer. Social media consultants call this the “long short” format. Sometimes they are used as teasers to draw viewers to still longer media (often on another platform).
Movies are also getting longer. At first glance, that makes no sense — more people are watching films at home on small digital devices, where Hollywood fare has to compete with bite-sized junk from TikTok and Instagram.
You might think that filmmakers would feel forced to compress their storytelling, but the opposite is true. They are learning that audiences crave something longer and more immersive than a TikTok.
At first, Hollywood insiders tried to imitate the ultra-short aesthetic, but they failed — sometimes in colossal fashion. (Does anyone remember the Quibi fiasco?)
Now they not only embrace long films, but happily release sprawling mega-movies longer than the Boston Marathon. Dune Two ran for 166 minutes — not even Eliud Kipchoge does that. Oppenheimer clocked in at 180 minutes. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon lasted a mind-boggling 206 minutes.
The studios would have vetoed these excesses just a few years ago. Not anymore.
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes.
Two of those long hit songs came from Taylor Swift — who has been a champion of longer immersive musical experiences, most notably in her insanely successful Eras tour. She set the record for the biggest money-generating roadshow in music history, and did it with a performance twice as long as a Mahler symphony.
These Swift concerts run for three-and-a-half hours (just like Scorsese at his most maniacal), and include more than 40 songs. They’re grouped in ten separate acts, each built around a different era in her career.
Ten acts? Really?
Even Wagner stopped short of that. But the Eras tour generated more than $2 billion in revenues. And all this happened while experts were touting 15-second songs on TikTok as the future of music.
I’ve charted the duration of Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences.
The New York Times complained about the length of her most recent album — calling it “sprawling and often self-indulgent.” It mocked her for believing that “more is more.”
It summed up her whole worldview with a dismissive claim that she has fallen in love with “abundance”. In fact, the Times opened its article with that accusation.
But I note that a year after the Times laughed at Swiftian abundance, the hottest topic in the culture is a book with that same word as its title. (Full disclosure: I’ll be doing a live Substack conversation with its co-author Derek Thompson in a few days.)
Abundance has dominated the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the last several months. Even more to the point, the word seems to tap into the public’s hunger for something bigger, deeper, and more expansive than it’s been getting.
H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.
Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …
June 23, 2025
80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots
Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:
I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.
Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?
Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.
On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.
With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).
We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.
But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.
Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.
Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.
Source: Experimental History
[…]
Look at music — and you see the same thing.
The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.
In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.
I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.
AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.
This is the new 80% rule.
Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.
- “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
- “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
- “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”
None of that sounds very appetizing.
June 10, 2025
They Live SG-1: Conquest and Paternalism
Feral Historian
Published 26 Jan 2024Stargate and SG-1 generally don’t go together, but they’re based on the same underlying premise. Our leaders are lying to us, denying us knowledge of fundamental truths about our world. Truths that can be the difference between freedom and slavery for all of humanity.
Sidenote, this is the first time I’ve shot one of these videos indoors instead of in the mountains. It’s -24 out on the day of recording.
00:00 Intro
01:05 Stargate
03:11 Ruling Class
04:18 Secrets
06:02 Illusions
06:48 Conclusion
June 5, 2025
D-Day and the Battle of Normandy on screen
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 4 Jun 2025Following on from the video about tank battles on screen, we look at the coverage of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy in movie and television dramas. This will be posted two days before the 81st anniversary of D-Day. As usual, this is a little about how good they are as drama and more about the historical background.
00.00 Introduction
02.50 Churchill
11.38 “Men on a mission” movies INTRO
16.45 Female Agents
20.20 The Dirty Dozen
32.06 The Big Red One
38.10 D Day: The Sixth of June
41.58 Patton
46.00 Night of the Generals
47.48 Breakthrough (1950)
49.36 Breakthrough (1971)
50.24 Pathfinders
57.48 Overlord
01.00.00 Storming Juno
01.04.48 My Way
01.12.12 They were not divided
01.17.24 Band of Brothers
01.51.00 Saving Private Ryan
02.33.45 The Longest Day
03.00.48 Conclusion and the “Ones that got away”For the discussion of the Pegasus Bridge project:
• Fighting On Film Podcast: Pegasus Bridge S…
May 8, 2025
Ted Gioia is apparently “the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything“
I’ve been reading Ted Gioia‘s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he’s some kind of Bond supervillain:
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.
Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.
Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.
I need some henchmen — any volunteers?
Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.
What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.
But now I’ve taken on a new guise. I’m the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything.
I don’t sing the blues. I don’t write about the blues. I now deliver the blues.
I originally declined the interview request from The Atlantic. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.
The subject was, he explained, a “pervasive suspicion that we’re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment”.
He said that I needed to be part of the story — because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.
This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore.
Dammit, Ted, we’re trying to have some fun here — and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.
I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.
To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library — these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.
[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on — to quote The Atlantic — the “death of civilization”.]
But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?
I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.
So today I’ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.
May 5, 2025
Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)
At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.
The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.
(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)
If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.
While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.
Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.
Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.
Still from The Battle of Britain
The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.
April 29, 2025
1984 and the Politicizing of Language
Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.
I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.
00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTruePost-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.
