If something can’t grab and maintain your attention within five minutes, then it isn’t worth your time. It requires taste, skepticism, and discernment to know quality when you see it.

Cut your losses
There was a time when I would watch a movie that wasn't very good, hoping it would pick up, only to realize after a half an hour or more, that it wasn't going to. I would have this sinking feeling that I had wasted my time, but then again there was nothing else on. In order to avoid this, I adopted the five-minute rule. If something isn’t good after five minutes, I turn it off, and go do something else.

The burden of choice
When all we had was TV, there wasn’t much choice. Now the problem is an overabundance of choice. Humans don’t do well with too many options; it paralyses us.

Lucky Charms?
I remember once I came across a man in the cereal aisle of the grocery store rocking back and forth in the fetal position on the polished linoleum floor, with his eyes glazed over, repeating, “Lucky Charms, Coco Puffs, Frosted Flakes, over and over, as if the choice were too much for him. No, this never happened, but you get my point. The problem with too much choice is that we worry we are going to “miss out” on something better if we don’t choose wisely, as if the consequences of doing so were always this:

What happens when you watch mainstream media.

Life is a cereal aisle
Now choosing your cereal amidst the thousand brands of processed, sugary, food-colored crap, is not the same as choosing between eternal life and death. Yet, in a way, it seems so. This is why we freeze up and become indecisive when confronted with too many options, and why we scroll endlessly on streaming services for movies. Not just because of the unlimited choice, but also the low quality of most of it. Indeed, like all the grails available, most movies and media will, if not kill you, makes you sick or braindead with propaganda, lies, violence, vulgarity and perversion. To avoid these hazards, I have on numerous occasions spent a movie-length of time scrolling through movies, all of which I decided not to watch. In effect, I was just checking the inventory.

Captive audience
It is important to understand that it’s not on because it’s good, it’s good because it’s on. What I mean by this, is that we assume something is good because it is “on” or televised or broadcast. This view comes from a time when we trusted our media, and when there were few choices, so we assumed there was a bit of quality control going on in the backroom where the decisions were made. Not the case.

They know they have a bored, captive audience that just wants to watch something because we’re tired from work or life maintenance. Consider all the crap we’ve watched just because we were too lazy to do anything else. That’s where they get you.

If you look back on past media production over time, you can see that by and large it was garbage. Almost none of it has aged well, and it doesn’t reflect favorably on us as a species. It is as the modern terms goes mostly “cringe”. Imagine extra-terrestrial archaeologists going through our cultural production after our species has ceased to exist. What would they think? Now we may still enjoy old movies for nostalgia’s sake, because they remind us of when we were young, and there are some gems there, but mostly it’s mediocre fare.

The self-chosen
What you need to understand is that the media you see is produced by a small group of people for their own economic and political benefit. Government has also been influencing media production for a long time in order to maintain the status quo.

In recent times, the media has become more woke, as there is a consensus and crossover, a revolving door if you will, between those in the media and those who govern us. These people are not regular Americans, and this is the reason the movies are so bad, and even bizarre and perverted, and don’t represent the nation as it actually is on the ground. To use a Plato metaphor, they’ve been projecting their world view on the wall of the cave so long that they’ve come to believe it themselves.

Predictive programming
To them, it is their perverse and socially harmful imagination that matters, and not reality itself. They are trying to brainwash us with the way they want things to be, and not how they are. In technical terms, this is called predictive programming: re-presenting society and its norms and values to move the Overton window of acceptable discourse where they want it to be, so that people will believe it, act accordingly, and make it happen. Woke in this sense is just another way of saying, useful idiots, which, not coincidentally, are essential for the imposition of communism.

Seeing is believing
When you control the means of cultural production, and have nearly unlimited money to finance it, then you can choose what the public sees, and thereby control what they think. Amidst all the apparent choice, people don’t really have any choice at all, because it’s all garbage. Either the mandarins are telling you how they want the world to be, or they are trying to humiliate you, or distract you with appeals to base emotions and the fad or manufactured outrage of the moment, which they have of course “boosted”.

Mutant goliaths
This is why “scaling” is such an important concept in the tech space, and otherwise. Scaling, or what used to be called growth, relies heavily on the concept of the long tail, or that fact that early movers in an industry or niche are able to establish scale, or a critical mass of customers or users, by the time others have entered the market. The latter make up the long tail of small players. The Covid fraud was effectively leveraged to snap off the long tail and aggregate more power at the top.

The little guy
Every day that passes, it becomes harder for new people to enter and compete, because the market is saturated with the big players, as these have established market share, and the related system of production, distribution, marketing, and legal services to maintain it. The early movers quickly become mediocre and then a barrier to innovation and progress, as they stifle competition to maintain their position. Increased regulation benefits them, because they have the lawyers to deal with it, while the little guy is crushed.

Media junkies
What happens when the media gets high on its own stash, is that it ceases to be able to produce anything of value. These people have become junkies on their own broadcasting power, and it shows in all their derivative, dull, vulgar, dishonest, and at times downright harmful, malevolent content. They can’t produce anything new, so all they do is franchises based on toys and superheroes, reboots of old films, or propaganda that would make Stalin proud.

Quality won’t be televised
Virtually nothing produced by the mainstream media or government passes the five-minute rule. To repurpose an old quote, it’s time to turn on your own creativity in alternative media, tune in to others who are creating value, drop out of the system of manufactured consent, and stop believing it’s on because it’s good. It’s on because it serves the interests of those in power. It’s on in forty different flavors of the same thing to distract you. We’re going to have to dig past the propaganda and lies to find the good, or create it ourselves. That’s the only way we’re going to get quality.

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