Beyond The Culture Wars Lies The Next Promised Land For Storytellers
But Engagement Algorithms Keep Pulling Us Right Back Into The Fight
Has anyone read The Butter Battle book by Dr. Seuss?
In the book, there’s a big wall separating two societies of hairless bird people.
One one side, the Yooks spread their butter on top of the bread. On the other side, the Zooks spread their butter on the bottom of the bread.
After a heated butter spreading argument at the wall, a years long arms race kicks off that escalates from using prickly sticks to nuclear bombs.
By the end, The Yooks and Zooks are willing to destroy everything and everyone to prove to the other side that they are doing it all wrong.
All of the industry, creativity and brain power that these bird people could muster got funneled into winning one ideological debate. At all costs. Nothing else in their society mattered… for generations!
The book is a parable about The Cold War (and the consequences of intolerance), but when the real Cold War ended, it kinda feels like all of that animosity and competition got funneled right into The Culture Wars.
Think about the back and forth arms race that has dominated the media landscape for the last 7 years. Holy fuck. We’ve fallen for the same trap. We’re all addicted to the one-upmanship that drives The Culture War. And after the big social media platforms shifted from using a follower algorithm to engagement (attention) algorithms, it was like pouring gasoline onto this fire.
The worst of us vaulted to the top of attention pyramid and set the new culture.
Think about all of the aggressively loud attention merchants that have drilled deep into these reserves of fear and used it as fuel to build their own empires.
They’re sprouted up like pimples on the face of America, spewing their bile over the rest of us. Now think about all of the quiet, wise and kind writers who have been drowned out by this aggressive discourse.
I had one of my fav stoner comedy writers recently email me to say that she gave up writing TV scripts because…
“I kinda realized that no matter how much I love TV I’ll never be the person crushing bones on my way to the top and for that reason I’m not cutout for it. Is that dark? lol"
No. It’s not dark. But it is heartbreaking to a girl dad like me.
A cool weird alternative girl giving up on her screenwriter dreams because the TV landscape has become too war-like and competitive.
How many storytellers are we ignoring because we’re too busy viewing “gotcha” content, political memes or infusing our stories with narrative warfare.
Is the rise of loneliness, dissociation and addiction partially due to people being so exhausted by this endless content war that they’ve found a way to check out?
It feels like if there was ever a time to call for a cease fire to reset our creative culture, it would be right fucking now. Everyone is blaming everyone and our storytelling brains have been hijacked by algorithmic-backed cultural warlords.
My life coach wife and I have a theory (hers mostly) that every civilization or organization is upheld by a simple scaffolding: stories create systems and systems then create the games we are all forced to play.
Everything from money to religion uses this equation, but let’s hone in on the left vs right ideologies of this culture war as an example.
The Left’s Story: One class of people built a comfortable standard of living for themselves by exploiting and enslaving other people, and that original sin needs to be addressed in the formation of a more equitable society.
The Left’s System: Fight hard to educate and incorporate new legal and financial frameworks into the dominant culture to balance the scales of power towards previously marginalized people, giving a voice to the voiceless.
The Left’s Game: Help us organize everyone into oppressor, oppressed and ally groups, so we can balance the structures of power by placing historically ignored voices in positions of leadership. Then we can change the culture from within.
Now let’s do the other side of The Butter Battle Wall…
The Right’s Story: Many different groups of people came to America escaping political oppression and did their best to create a society where everyone is free. It’s not perfect but if you don’t like it, you can leave. Oh, and Jesus already died for our original sins, so we don’t want to hear about the sins of our ancestors.
The Right’s System: Preserve our meritocracy by upholding traditional values, celebrate the strive excellence in your field and protect a religious code of conduct that makes everyone love thy neighbors.
The Right’s Game: The Ten Commandments are much easier to remember than all of this identity politics stuff. Stick with us and you’ll never feel ashamed to be an American. Now go find people who are confused about these new rules and bring them to us. We’ll handle the red-pilling from there.
Sadly, these two sides have entered a zero sum game. They will be locked into a forever war and it will continue to dominate our industries (and our collective focus) until we come up with a new era of stories, systems and games (likely one that blends the best of both and leaves the worst behind).
Writers have been a historically oppressed and fucked over group of people, yet the next set of stories-systems-games rests on our lil introverted nerd shoulders.
If writers can learn how to divorce our story brains from the addiction of being validated by like-minded peers (for having the same answers), and start asking the uncomfortable but unifying questions, then we just might be able to create a new culture to step into, a better option than what we have now.
A promised land of great storytelling that celebrates optimism, empathy, compromise and wisdom.
A Post-Culture-Wars-Counter-Culture making stories that offer a subtle shift in perspective, not content that grabs our attention to give us a quick dopamine fix.
Better stories = better systems and healthier games we all have to (or get to) play.
We either rip away our creativity away from the toxicity of The Culture Wars or we’ll all be forced to continue playing by their rules:
The loudest and most aggressive “skull crushers” get the new deals, projects and platforms because they drive more engagement (both the good & bad).
We don’t care how talented you are. If you’re uncertain about anything we tell you or if you question any of our side’s shared truths, we will replace you with someone that knows what to say. Someone who is more certain.
You can make massive mistakes and colossal miscalculations and we will look the other way as long as you never give up trying to convince the other side of the wall that they are wrong about everything.
Every creative medium has been contaminated by a war-like mindset: non-stop messaging designed to incite-recruit more people into this narrative arms race.
I deleted Instagram & Facebook entirely and use Reddit & Youtube sparingly because I could see those content pipelines trying to take me on a radicalized algorithm/character/consumer arc.
I think most of us are utterly exhausted from being manipulated into this fight. But not the attention merchants and dopamine cartels that pay them. They are fueled by this division.
How much longer can this go on?
On the final page of The Butter Battle Book, a Yook and a Zook (who have grown old during this arms race) both hold nuclear bombs over their opponents side of the wall, a standoff of mutually assured destruction.
Both of them saying “Who will drop it? We will see. We will see.”
I think we can all see that another 4 years of an escalating Culture War will decimate what’s left of our legacy storytelling industries (publishing, social media, Hollywood, video games) and leave us with a power vacuum that continues to be dominated by opportunistic narrative tyrants.
How did we all get drafted into the ranks of this zero sum game?
Not sure. But telling better stories is the only thing that can get us out of it.
We can start by getting back to just making… Good. Fucking. Movies.
With real human actors. Talking about funny things. Or serious things. Most of us don’t care who’s starring in it or what it’s about as as long as it’s well written.
But with the Culture Wars still raging and AI content rising, I do fear that the market for human-centric stories is rapidly shrinking.
Why would anyone watch soothing films like Perfect Days or Past Lives when everyone around you is glued to their phones, hate-watching a Youtube compilation of their ideological enemies?
The hate Matrix is gaining more recruits, but there’s way more ideological outcasts than there are rank and file culture warriors.
We’ve just been tricked by algorithms to think everyone is an ideological radical.
I’m a big dumb idiot who often chooses dissociation (fantasy novels) or addiction (too many to list) as my means of escaping The Culture Wars, but here’s my best guess on how storytellers can evolve beyond this era and set a new culture.
Take a digital detox to break your addiction to content, then revisit our divisive issues with a lens of compassion and compromise. Douglas Rushkoff, Adam Alter, Cal Newport and Jenny Oddel helped power my detox.
Accept the fact that a world where everyone thinks exactly like you do is an extremely boring and sanitized world that will not foster great storytelling.
Recenter your story themes around simple wisdom and collective human truths (our shared flaws) not the external identity factors dividing us now. *Stop using all Cultural War terminology in your stories.
Attack the systems profiting off of our polarity, not the cultural warlords benefitting from them. They are just a byproduct of the attention landscape and they will deescalate or disappear when we make being angry uncool.
Forgive all of the fear-based decision making that led us to this standoff. When you pass someone on the street, imagine giving them a Bronze Star for being wounded somehow in The Culture Wars. Seriously, it felt like every week for the past 7 years, there was a giant Price is Right Wheel that spun and landed on a random demographic to become the new scapegoat. Everyone took a turn on The Culture War wheel and it sucked when it was your turn. But this cultural era saw the rise of new ideologies, massive protests, contentious elections, had two years of COVID lockdowns and witnessed the rise of extremely polarizing social media platforms. No wonder why we all became paranoid, isolated, conspiracy-spewing digital hate merchants. Time for writers to forgive and forge on together.
Writers are my people. The only tribe I have besides my family. I believe it falls on us to become the vanguard for the next set of story mandates.
News and social media will continue to serve up hyper relevant narrative slop to the engagement algorithm gods, but our stories need to go back to being evergreen and timeless.
That starts with writers learning how to protect and defend our story ground from every single agenda but pure entertainment, imagination and empathy.
We have to resist the contaminating effect of The Culture Wars or it will continue to consume everything and fracture everyone.
Stories should break down walls, not reinforce them.
