Mainlining Slime Girl Embryo
A reflection on the flow of knowledge and its relationship to power in cultural production; will Foucault get slimed! at the Kids Choice Awards?
The second half of the one Marshall McLuhan quote goes, “…the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
This, when applied to western mass media culture—limiting ourselves to entertainment, not necessarily newsmedia-, becomes a microcosm of our economics: how studios treat labor (from janitors to gaffers to writers and directors to performers) exemplifies that our class prerogatives should not, truly, be all that different, and yet they are, but in the service of those who stand to profit the most; studio heads and patrons like advertisers and underwriters. The idea that a performer making a substantial sum of money as a worker probably doesn’t, on its face, make a whole lot of sense, however, consider that someone who did far less (often nothing, as ownership often does), was paid substantially more and these star salaries are a pay-off to comply with the order of our economics, so there’s little collectivizing incentive (too rarely do you hear of a situation like The Office where Steve Carrell joined the WGA strike in solidarity, which likely made the action more effective, because management could not argue that they were putting otherwise working people out of work, falsely or not, as a point of guilt against the exploited, as is often how strikes get broken).
We often hear about the impact of the industry on child actors, and that it is so much inherent to the system of media creation, that many child stars have spoken out in favor of banning the practice. This, again, reflects the corrupting nature of codifying business owners having a fiduciary duty, but little in the way of protecting workers, giving license to maximally exploit workers as long as it maximally derives profit to extract from their labor. With children, this exploitation is multi-tiered; maybe they have a stage parent, for example, or as is often the case, no matter how good they are at their craft, often they are aged out of marketability, because, well, people get older, and in lieu of traditional work experience, or as is more often the case, their removal from normal socialization makes developing an identity separate from this history difficult to translate into a normal life.
An example of how even the best intentions still, ultimately, bend to the will of an inherent corrupt and exploitative system of economics, represented in our media culture, and the culture around its production, is that of the Nickelodeon network. I recently read Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age, which made one thing clear about its founding: It wanted to be the anti-Disney, but its principals today all acknowledge that it has functionally become the same in process and content, while performers between the two speak to the early differences in the culture, with the latter reflecting less of their humanity in the characters they plated, and more the sensibilities of a multi-national corporation. Melissa Joan Hart, at one point, for example, characterizes her time at Disney/ABC on a show like Sabrina the Teenage Witch as the best time of her life, but as a character “I would not have been Sabrina’s friend” and said the opposite of her character on Nickelodeon, Clarissa. I mention this, because it demonstrates what Nickelodeon tried to be, and what it became; the salve of material prosperity is what made performers, now adults, tolerate it.
Early in the interviews, the “anti-Disney” line is used to characterize a type of ecosystem for child stars: they were normal kids, educated as normal kids, few had stage parents, most had overprotective parents (probably a good thing), but most from that early cohort turned out to be comparatively normal adults, seemingly, or at least better equipped that previous and subsequent generations of child cultural laborers to process their experiences— this was the ethos of making your business successful by treating your workers well, but the built-in exploitation I mentioned, because children lack agency, is omnipresent, and it leaves room for what came from relationships with media giants like Viacom. You’d find few, in this text, even among the most critical of their time on these shows, with the understandable and righteous ire of someone like Corey Feldman, where the distinction is that the culture around this exploitation, toxicity, etc. was openly practiced, and that the price for prosperity was tolerating it, whereas someone like Feldman, similarly unprotected by this culture, also declined to view this as normal or perhaps even just incapable of perceiving it as normal in the previous generation of child performers. Even in the post-Viacom configuration, there’s been little actual mitigation of these harms, but heightened attention to the perception of there having been installed guardrails on how children are treated; there’s an Overton Window of behavior, and those who push it too far, Dan Schneider being the prime example (Jennette McCurdy’s account, for example, is just one of many where he runs amok, tolerated by management for various reasons, until it became undeniable) being sacrificed by an industry willing to tolerate it as long as it yielded comfortable financial and cultural returns. This is better to the extent that, yes, people are being held accountable, but worse in that this is a postmodern configuration of the original condition, where the harm still occurs, as frequently, with less scrutiny, because the presumption of protections now exist, even if they are pro forma, at best.
Part of the narrative I found interesting was that there was an attempt to mitigate this exploitative nature of child performers: the network became known for, aside from several beloved live action shows, physical challenge gameshows and audience participation where only adults where performers and children appear incidentally, the product being the experience; you appear on TV, take part in the meat of the content, but you’re not a child actor— you are the product but experientially are not, as the thinking argues, exploited as a worker, even if you are exploited as a profit center. Even this mild effort to engage an audience as content was a league above its competitors in this regard. Ultimately, because the adults are workers as well, the shows “unable” (bullshit references to the cost of negotiating with Teamsters, etc.) to have unionized crews and performers, personalities like Marc Summers could no longer tolerate the rigor required, and while they loved the work conceptually, they could not countenance the cost of that success, which was often their personal lives’ health— the recognizable expression of how capitalist exploitation manifests.
As I said, it’s complex to describe someone well-paid as being enslaved by their work, but the material reality doesn’t just encompass financial compensation:
“All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” writes Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle; the paycheck supplants all other aspects of human satisfaction, at least in terms of economics, in this case. Marc Summers, for example, should have been satisfied not seeing his family, because he was compensated “fairly” to spend his weekends with other peoples’ children, if we were to apply this concept to this narrative. The medium no longer represents the message, but what is telegraphed, broadcasted does; this is metaphor for workers being cast as having mercenary senses of self-actualization. Debord says, “Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”— this applies perfectly to the entire Nickelodeon schtick: even experientally, the idea that workers can ultimately be lured in by ideology (in Summers’ case, a steady paycheck and a seemingly healthy attitude towards work) but ultimately have that ethic paid off, and feel guilt for not enjoying the ride.
In the end, the lack of regulatory rigor over the ecosystem inhabited by the child actors, workers, participants, etc. meant that being the anti-Disney imbued this environment with the same pitfalls of any libertarian-ideal-coded venture; the harm potential was endless, and only at the good faith of other participants, is safety possible, which diminishes in return as time goes on, the absent guardrails become obvious voids, and the presumption of responsibility to others becomes a more and more tenuous concept. One could argue this degrades the natural inclination toward collectivized incentive inherent to humanity, but one that is naturally eroded by exploitative systems that misalign morality with metaphysical duties of, for example, becoming a successful capitalist. As has become clear, these dangers were manifest— from the sexual abuse directed toward the children in this atmosphere, to the drug culture rampant in the overwork of early animators because, absent the ability to unionize, there was no relief coming, to sexual abuse of members of the public at the hands of showrunners themselves from the earliest days of the company’s mainstream relevance.
There exists in the United States, and western capitalist order more broadly, a tradition of the agents of cultural death becoming the main traffickers in commoditizing nostalgia for that which they killed; I’ve written of this before regarding the phenomenon of Blockbuster killing the video store industry, but also leaving behind a creatively weakened, and more timid, film industry, while profiting immensely from nostalgia about this lost history with none of the accountability for this condition. Perhaps more pernicious, this history of Nickelodeon fully embraces that toxicity as part of the slog toward cultural and nostalgic hegemony for a certain era and flavor of entertainment that, even today, is heavily associated with today’s programming, even if the tone and tenor of this content no longer reflects this sort of lawless swamp.
There was, to be sure, a lot of quality in this work, and not every pocket of content that is well-remembered had a toxic back office, but it’s undeniable that a lot of the best remembered programs had these problems to one degree or another, and you’re left wondering if this is an acceptable cost for quality entertainment (or, to be more specific about why this matter, cultural contemporaneous contextual impact), which you could also easily conclude, readily, that it was not— Foucault argues that all knowledge is collective, not objectively derived, from the mind of a privileged and omniscient few, but that power is the culmination of factors, that influence the flow and cultivation of knowledge, and like anything, culture, like politics, like science, could have, and likely eventually would have, through some other means, developed in some significant, material way if it had not in the one way history occurs. It may seem trivial to apply this to the production of media, especially for children, but this is, both, a situation built on the harm of the vulnerable, for cultural product, that again, could have been satisfied through some non-exploitative need, but instead, the harm itself was commoditized as culture, a supposedly transgressive (rather than just vile) set of acts of exploitation.
This is all to say that, like any system of mainstream, quotidian exploitation, it is meant to seem trivial, while also the product of its exploitation is seen as, if not worth it, then at least essential in some lasting cultural memory; one could argue this sort of critique is a pattern of “because of woke” we now (???) care (to the extent that these kinds of offenses are even taken seriously by the legal system, let alone other members of the public) about sexual exploitation, or that because there is now a latent request to critically re-evaluate the production of culture or consumptive modes, there is defensiveness about having produced or consumed, as if there is an accusation of complicity (there is not, at least not until one argues this does not matter, at which point, one might not be complicit, but tacitly approves). The action item here is not any of these things, but simply the admission of new, or perhaps just previously suppressed or even just not articulated, information into awareness of culture; how one receives this information speaks to the impact of this shift from collective incentive, and hyperindividualist thought causing colony collapse, a sort of postmodern form of individualism where it’s not enough to hold your own self-interest as primary, but openly at the expense of someone else, or in this case, holding cultural consumption as primary atop, what is the the Platonic Ideal of, exploitation. This instance, described in the above text, is not unique in entertainment, but is a particularly pernicious, both for what happened as well as what it represents about the entertainment industry, and through a critical lens, leaves much to reflect upon as cultural participant (the consumer, for whom, ostensibly, this is created, but in postmodernity, is being utilized, oneself, as product) depending how one views the role of cultural production.
Per Foucault, “This form of power [in this case, the ability to influence the formation and traffic of knowledge, more specifically, cultural hegemony] applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.”
Extras
Some things I’ve found/I’ve been recommended/I’m reading, watching, or listening to that I am now recommending:
Accessibility of Command Line Interfaces (ACM)
death/corner reading list (Reddit)