Critique and reviews are not the same thing.
Reviews are marketing for the corporate entertainment complex. Telling you if something is “good” or “bad” is a way of focusing attention on it. Reviews are from the mass media age, when publishers did reviews to attract ad-soend from entertainment corps.
I don’t have any interest in reviews, I never looked at them. Nothing I have ever done has included a rating. I barely ever say whether anything is good / bad etc.
And I’m not alone. The audience for “reviews” has crashed. Even a titan among reviewers like Mark Kermode, who I fully respect, has relatively few views since moving to youtube.
What I’m interested in, what I believe has value, and what people do watch on youtube, is critique.
If I tell you the new BigMac tastes good. Or tastes bad and is overpriced. That’s a review playing its part in consumer capitalism.
If I tell you the new BigMac is made from agricultural waste product, needs an acre of rainforst to be cut down, and the profits fund far right politics. That’s a kind of critique.
Critique should be neither positive or negative. It should be honest. But talking honestly about our world entails often sounding negative.
Which leads me to the angry nerdbros.
Who I pay attention to because what they do is a very low grade form of critique.
Reactionary critique. They stumble over many of the structural problems in our culture industries and then
as reactionaries do
blame them on minorities. Or anything and anyone other than the people with actual power.
And I feel some duty to contradict the reactionary critique using facts and reason.
So in this most recent chapter of Damo vs Angry Nerdbros I tackle the high pitched reactionary whine that “Star Trek went woke!”
No. It went corporate. And then it got bought by a billionaire.
🔗👇
Damien Walter 