There’s a difference between someone who’s an actor and someone who’s distinctly a theater kid, just like there’s a difference between someone who’s a musician and someone who’s distinctly a band kid, and the theater kids seem to be taking over our media institutions lately. Nobody on the current snl cast seems like a normal person with a good sense of humor - they all feel deeply sheltered and siphoned through private schools and theater camps. It’s more about taste than theater in particular too - I can’t judge people for caring about drama as an art form, but too many new celebrities and comedians seem like they can recite songs from wicked and hamilton from memory.
To agree with you, this phenomena of real observations being used and pushed by bad actors is exactly how things like GamerGate are smuggled into popular culture. In that case, they specifically smuggled in “Games are becoming female and woke.” (plus targeted harassment of particular female content creators) from the pretty ubiquitous observation that ‘Professional games journalism is pretty much horseshit created to drive sales of increasingly homogenized and poor games, not to critique games and drive improvement of the medium in a way that benefits the consumers or workers in those industries.’
Of course, that was also simply tapping into a misogynistic culture that was already very present and loud, and directing that into ‘consumer politics’. It’s not like they had much work to actually do.
Yeah, indeed. I’ve been terminally online for long enough that I was there for the genesis of gamergate and its hijacking. Good point of reference to include in the scope of this discussion.