Narrative Warfare: The Pop Cultist Gatekeepers

I'm going to talk about something akin to Not Invented Here Syndrome, which is this:

Not invented here (NIH) is the philosophical principle of not using third party solutions to a problem because of their external origins. False pride often drives an enterprise to use less-than-perfect invention in order to save face by ignoring, boycotting, or otherwise refusing to use or incorporate obviously superior solutions by others.

In trying to reach out to fan channels at YouTube who claim to be open to any science fiction, I run into something similar. These channels are focused on audio-visual media, often Big Brand media, and increasingly complaining about one or more Big Brands while doing nothing useful to solve the problems that they decry. The parallel is that "here" means "Big Brand media", and "not here" means what is outside of that.

Because of this media bias, they are often wholly unaware of what is going on in the wider field. They don't know about the book world in particular, so the disruption of the publishing world they are dimly aware of due to Big Brands leeching off generations-old classics such as Dune has escaped their notice; they still think OldPub is all that exists, when all they need to do is skim the Kindle Store on Amazon to see that everything they claim to want is there in abundance.

They claim to want it. They don't. They want the Brand. They are not fans of the genre; they are Fans of the Brand. They are true Pop Cultists, and getting them to go outside the brand is exactly the same as getting them to leave a cult like Scientology.

"Not Invented Here" in this content is not hard to see. If it isn't from the Brand--and thus in the media they see as high-status and legitimate, from the sources that validate their existence--they aren't interested and are dismissive if not hostile to everything outside that cultist context. This makes these channels good gatekeepers. By letting these channels complain about the Brand, yet shut out off-Brand alternatives, the Brand benefits by keeping people on the reservation and those people usually--reliably--end up playing the paypig because whatever resistance they may put up is easily worn down.

They are, in effect, playing the same game that Cuckservative Inc. does in the political realm. They just don't know it, and wouldn't grok it if confronted with it. Yet. But the result is the same, and so is the conclusion: they hold the gates to the wider audience. Those that are not hostile to us are wholly uninterested; it is better to route around them for now than to confront them. They have to face the collapse of their cult before they will be open to persuasion otherwise.