why aren't koreans reproducing? well who knows, better focus on shutting down some piracy. fucking governments
Even the AI bots are responding in the article's comment section.
Just like the Imperial Core is outsourcing industrial and agricultural labor to the periphery, the US is trying to outsource its hyperproductive cultural industry to its vassal economic laboratories
Free entertainment is a way to occupy and distract the festering masses. And yet they remain determined to scrub all capacity for such.
If most people using free streaming could pay most would be already.
Being able to extract profit is more important to individual capitalist than maintaining the system in the long run. See: climate change.
Climate change is still nebulous. It’s like population decline. Few will face the impact of it with anything practical or human until the negative impact personally stares them in the face.
George Floyd protests and riots happened, in large part, because people were bored, unoccupied, and angsty about the world. Human behavior points rarely happen under the influence of a single variable.
If anything, people are more fed up with their daily world, now, than at the time of Floyd. I think that’s a piece of why people kept reporting a sense of impending doom all year.
Now we’ve hit a point where one guy with everything to lose said “enough” and went after a health care CEO. And we have plenty of people in this nation with nothing to lose. I wouldn’t be surprised if stage 4 cancer people started throwing themselves at CEOs.
The wall of inactivity and learned helplessness has broken with Luigi.
They’re not seeing how this scrubbing of entertainment access will impact the masses going forward? Plenty of people will steer away from action if you just give them free distraction.
But here we are, instead, working hard to scrub all free distraction.
Competition is won by those who extract profit now. Those who refrain from profiting even if they want to preserve the ability to profit in the future for whatever reason lose competition and are removed from making decisions. So only the most shortsighted capitalists remain.
If most people using free streaming could pay most would be already.
Surely this gets less true when every streaming service raises their price every 3 months, however.
You'd think there's a whole soft-power paradigm being missed here.
The value of export content well exceeds the license fees you negotiate with the English repackagers. Think of how entire generations view Japan favourably after a steady diet of anime, samurai/ninja stereotypes, and kaiju movies.
Flood the market. Free international rights for all. Sponsor your own damned fansubs if you have to. Use it to soft sell your culture, history, and branding. We need 24 episodes of an isekai animation featuring a bishounen Syngman Rhee stat.
They’re US vassals. They don’t care about soft power just enriching themselves as much as possible while avoiding drawing US ire and being taken out back to be killed for competing too successfully. (See plaza accords when Japan did this)
In other words their power doesn’t come from a positive view by westerners but by loyalty to Washington’s geopolitical interests. They’re never going to change anything because they can’t overcome US-centric media and its power.
No amount of cultural popularity will help them if they’re turned into a villain for being a threat to the US’s interests. Similarly it’s not necessary for them to have good PR for soft power in the first place because of their subservient position. Their interests are tied to that of the US so displacing the culture power of the US with their own at no profit doesn’t benefit them and no individual corporation or capitalist is going to forgo profits for some vague hope of their country having more leverage as a vassal in 20 years.
Japan is viewed favorably because the US forced them to commit economic suicide in the 90s and the hate campaign let up. We are 35 years out from massive racism and fearmongering about Japan pushed by the media which relented and created this space only after they were brought to heel. Look how many Asian food places in the west still say “no MSG”. That was driven by western media reporting, racism, and fearmongering and clearly is still stronger than any anime fan feelings of positivity towards a normal ingredient.
Also wasn’t that guy their puppet dictator first leader who presided over numerous atrocities with a regime full of Japanese collaborators?
Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently "democracy" has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.
They don't teach that style of crazy in dictator school.
As for the "Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up", duh, but I figure there's perhaps some chance to exploit some "we've been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it" and "we're a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally" mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.
