PopPolitic: Dragons, Fandom and Consumer Power

“All art is quite useless” Oscar Wilde.

Wilde is of course right. In terms of plain old survival; art is useless. That is part of its joy. To have the time to try to make or enjoy something beautiful, or thought provoking, is the one of the most sublime aspects of leisure. That’s why the verb “To Netflick” exists. That is also why a lot of the internet, is people talking about the useless . We share our overlapping narratives whether they are fictional or not.

So, the summer’s gone and so too has that weird moment in time when my YouTube recommendations were chockablock with Vlogs and video essays; ranting about Star Wars and Game of Thrones. Now, I know I locked myself into an algorithm bubble. You Tube’s A.I. just fed me that stuff because I click, click, click. Even so, that’s a lot of content generated and a very big bubble.

When the new trilogy of Star wars came out and everybody was happy for a while and then the Fandom started to complain that the Force Awakens was too similar to A New Hope. So, when Disney made the next one they decided to usurp their expectations and do everything different.

The fandom complained that the film went too far. Now J.J. Abrahams has retaken his place in the director’s chair as a “safe pair of hands” which is as much a signal to the Fandom that Disney has taken note (again) and will fix the problem.

Now you could say, “There are more important things to fret about and criticize,” and you’d be right.

However, note how much more effective this model of consumer “activism” is when backed up by threatening the bottom line of the company involved. Solo: a star wars story was  financially disappointing for Disney, and this sent the message that the fans might not let the corporation  milk the Star Wars cash cow for all they can.

 The complaints about the end of game of thrones came too late, but you can be sure that any future projects with that intellectual property will take note and be influenced by them, ( in fact J.J. Martin has been handed a blueprint of what not to do) and I’ve spoken about the obvious impact of the fandom on the Star wars films. There’s a lesson here to be taken. We have power as consumers and we need to start using it politically.

The extreme right is already way ahead of us on this, boycotting Star wars for having more race and gender representative castings, burning Nike shoes for being “woke”. Sure, you can argue that these protests were largely ineffective, in fact they just fed the media machine. This is because the numbers were too small, unorganized and just didn’t get enough traction. Also, they were protesting something that (for the moment) just wouldn’t mobilize huge numbers of people.

Despite declaring record profits over the last decade the three biggest computer game companies have laid off huge numbers of staff. What if fans of those games boycotted the products on the staff’s behalf?  What if there was a “Don’t buy Amazon” day to protest that companies dire track record of badly treating their minimum wage overworked staff?

We need to start seeing ourselves as more of what we have actually become: a consuming class. We can no longer build a strong union movement again, but a consumer movement would have strength. The union movement used the denial of production and therefore profit for the owners of the companies, if we could wield our purchasing with the same determination and focus, then we could put some power back in our court. If we can change a multi-billion dollar film, then together we can change the world. We need to survive, in order to make more art. We can start doing that by voting with our wallets, the boycott can be the industrial strike of the 21^st Century. It is time to start a rebellion against the corporate Empire.