Everything, really. From the profound works of art to the casual entertaining story to the campy knock-offs to the most niche, guilty-pleasure, trope-filled webcomic you can imagine. And we will need to reinvent almost all of it.
I think we will need a solid amount of media retelling myths and popular stories without the capitalistic lens that colors almost everything. Because capitalist media has been super effective and as much fun as documentaries are, we need the subtlety of “casual and entertaining” storytelling as well. Possibly more so. Creatives might not need to be as subtle as we are now within a capitalist distribution of stories, but we do need to be just as prolific in putting enough stories out there in every genre that will help normalize ways of fighting exploitation. I think we in the west, in particular, have a bad habit of ignoring how much general media affects us, so the counters to capitalistic media are few and most of our literature is very direct about what you are getting on the cover from communist organizations. We have no real organized publication for fictional media. And that bites us pretty heavily as we can’t normalize seeing what a worker-controlled workplace actually looks like for people we’re trying to reach. And in the future, that kind of media needs to be as readily available as capitalist media is today in every place you look. I’d like to see us reimagine and shake up entire genres—what do superheroes look like through a communist lens? Zombies? What is the communist take on fantasy worlds where kings are chosen via magic weapons? Because with an ML lens, these things change drastically and could inject some amazing commentary into the various genres and flip many of them on their heads. And that is what I’m most interested in seeing. That storytelling truly comes alive with new lessons to help navigate and understand the world (which is the evolutionary purpose of storytelling). Most importantly, if we don’t, the hundreds of years of capitalist-biased media will have some ugly ramifications.
Everything, really. From the profound works of art to the casual entertaining story to the campy knock-offs to the most niche, guilty-pleasure, trope-filled webcomic you can imagine. And we will need to reinvent almost all of it.
I think we will need a solid amount of media retelling myths and popular stories without the capitalistic lens that colors almost everything. Because capitalist media has been super effective and as much fun as documentaries are, we need the subtlety of “casual and entertaining” storytelling as well. Possibly more so. Creatives might not need to be as subtle as we are now within a capitalist distribution of stories, but we do need to be just as prolific in putting enough stories out there in every genre that will help normalize ways of fighting exploitation. I think we in the west, in particular, have a bad habit of ignoring how much general media affects us, so the counters to capitalistic media are few and most of our literature is very direct about what you are getting on the cover from communist organizations. We have no real organized publication for fictional media. And that bites us pretty heavily as we can’t normalize seeing what a worker-controlled workplace actually looks like for people we’re trying to reach. And in the future, that kind of media needs to be as readily available as capitalist media is today in every place you look. I’d like to see us reimagine and shake up entire genres—what do superheroes look like through a communist lens? Zombies? What is the communist take on fantasy worlds where kings are chosen via magic weapons? Because with an ML lens, these things change drastically and could inject some amazing commentary into the various genres and flip many of them on their heads. And that is what I’m most interested in seeing. That storytelling truly comes alive with new lessons to help navigate and understand the world (which is the evolutionary purpose of storytelling). Most importantly, if we don’t, the hundreds of years of capitalist-biased media will have some ugly ramifications.