Empire of Slop

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack.

Take a look at the four images below and tell me what you see.

If my life depended on it, I could not name a single one of the TV shows pictured here and, if you told me they were all taken from the same series I would believe you. The first thing that comes to mind is “Game of Thrones,” but we could just as easily be looking at one of the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies or any number of expensively produced high fantasy series that now pop up regularly on streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix. One imagines these shows have a feudal setting of some kind and maybe a dash of magic realism. There’s probably some violence, maybe even intense violence, but our heroes also get to enjoy a few laughs. I’d wager there’s a quest of some kind, and a bearded oaf whose deceptively grouchy manner in fact masks a more tender side that ultimately lies beneath. Does it matter? Even if you’ve never seen these shows, you almost certainly kind of have.

I’ve incidentally been revisiting “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” an older, less expensive show light years more imaginative than most of what’s on TV today. And, perhaps because it feels particularly germane in the age of AI, I’ve found myself thinking about the Holodeck.

The Holodeck, for the uninitiated, is a fictional device that was introduced in “TNG’s” pilot episode back in 1987. Essentially, it’s a big room inside the starship Enterprise that can create realistic 3D renderings of places and people — so realistic, in fact, that you can touch or handle things and they actually feel solid. The Holodeck characters themselves are also fully interactive, and so close to resembling actual people that they might easily be mistaken for them. In effect, it’s a virtual simulator through which basically any fantasy can be realized and explored — in some ways even more utopian as a concept than other Trek mainstays like the transporter or warp drive.

Technobabble explanations for how it actually works aside, the Holodeck still takes some significant leaps of imagination. For one thing, it’s a finite space but generally appears limitless once the characters are actually inside (a few early episodes flirted with the idea there’s an invisible “wall” of some kind you can bump up against, but this was eventually abandoned). It’s also amusing how much the fantasies of people who supposedly live in a scientifically advanced, cosmopolitan version of the 24th century seem to revolve around things people enjoyed in the 20th: baseball, Sherlock Homes, noir detective fiction, New Orleans jazz, Westerns, Robin Hood, ’50s sports cars, etc. And, needless to say, if such technology really existed it would also inevitably be used for less PG-rated downtime than what one sees in “Star Trek.”

Notwithstanding these caveats, the Holodeck is still an intriguing example of utopian science fiction and, like most things of its kind, clearly had as much to say about the present as it did about the future. In the fantasy life of late-20th century societies, few things loomed quite so large or seemed so compelling as the promise of virtual reality.¹ If traditional gaming allows us to experience discrete, prewritten fantasy worlds through a TV or computer screen, VR technology holds up the utopian prospect that literally any fantasy might one day be brought to life and immersively experienced at the push of a button.

Since the pilot episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the likes of computer-generated imagery and gaming technology have grown by leaps and bounds. VR headsets — once clunky, prohibitively expensive and available mostly as boutique objects — have become bona fide mass market products. And, thanks to huge improvements in computing hardware, they can now offer a three-dimensional gaming experience that at least graphically rivals their more conventional competitors. Much the same is true of other media (films, TV shows, etc.) too.

Broadly speaking, our technical capacity to render fantasy entertainment on a grand scale dwarfs that of previous generations, as do the resources (financial and otherwise) available to major developers and entertainment companies. Never in the whole of human history has so much technology and capital been invested in the production of movies, games and other fantasy worlds.

By and large, however, the result has not conformed to the expansive, utopian template reflected in something like the Holodeck. Instead, we are paradoxically living through an era where much of mass entertainment is increasingly derivative and homogenous and very little feels genuinely new.

In the world of gaming, masterpieces like FromSoft’s Sekiro or Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption II are the exceptions, and for every one of them there are literally dozens of games featuring gigantic open worlds with absolutely nothing inside of them. The same is arguably even truer of TV, where ballooning budgets, A-list casting and sprawling multiseason arcs are more likely to yield mediocre tedium than the unforgettable experiences once offered by prestige pioneers like “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire.” More imaginative efforts like “Severance” do exist but, again, they are the exception. No doubt this partly comes down to taste, but I have watched the last three seasons of “The Wire” exactly once and still remember their various arcs and characters quite well. The first season of Prime’s “The Rings of Power,” by contrast, is the single most expensive season of television ever produced and, despite having seen it much more recently, I could not tell you a single salient fact about it with a loaded firearm pointed squarely at my head.

In any case, the root causes of this malaise are hardly mystical. Thanks to financialization and deregulation, mass entertainment has become intensely concentrated and monopolistic: The relatively small number of major conglomerates behind games, TV and big-budget blockbusters alike increasingly shying away from anything new and favoring instead a franchise model from which they can wring endless value from existing intellectual property without ever having to take risks or innovate. Sometimes, as is the case with Marvel or Star Wars, this is quite literally the case (and here convoluted metaverses have become the favored device). Elsewhere, as testified by the images we began with, it manifests more indirectly in a constant churn of movies and shows that recycle well-worn visual motifs and narrative formulas to such an extent that some are nearly impossible to distinguish from one another.

Either way, the results are predictably as homogenous and derivative as the formulaic style now associated with AI, Mr Beast thumbnails and Trump-branded NFT collections: pastiches of copies of simulacra that look a thousand times more mass produced than the cultural products of the mid- or even late 20th century.

Not unreasonably, it was once assumed that increased technological capacity would expand rather than narrow the horizons of fantasy life. Today, in place of the Holodeck, we are paradoxically swimming in slop instead.