I had to look up what a kill fee is.<p>From <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-kill-fee-1360477" rel="nofollow">https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-kill-fee-1360477</a> :<p>> A kill fee is a payment on a magazine or newspaper article that a publisher makes to a freelance writer when their assigned article is "killed," or canceled.
> As a Gen Xer, I cannot be tortured enough to care about these bland, apolitical, self-commercialized, professional personalities and, as far as I can tell, neither can most of my peers. When my crowd was coming of age, we called this sort of thing “selling out.<p>> We identified with Naomi Klein, who back in 1999 wrote No Logo, the book with which you waged an intellectual war against identifying with any kind of branding. Branding (especially yourself, God forbid) was anathema to Ms. Klein and to us, too.<p>Well, the '90s were a totally different time. It was infinitely easier to get a well-paying job with reasonable working conditions, but the economy is massively more unequal and feels way more all-or-nothing now. Basically (and I'm exaggerating for effect) you either sell out or you eke out some kind of meager existence, and who wouldn't seriously think about selling out in that kind of situation?
I'd go further and say that all online identity politics is about branding and buying an identity to be shown to others and yourself online.<p>It's brand loyalty and consumer capitalism in another new form.
One kind of intriguing thing when it comes to the near obsessive degree at which "the younger generation" (it's really mostly just a really loud subsection) is linking "buying merchandise" to "having a personality/showing you are a good person" is that they've basically managed to start calling for a recreation of the Hays Code.<p>For anyone who didn't know, the Hays Code is the reason why so many old Hollywood movies had these overly stiff, Dudley Do-Good vision of the world. It was a moral code that was written to be as inoffensive as possible to the lowest common denominator. You couldn't depict something morally wrong without there being some kind of punishment for the wrongdoer, that sorta thing. Sounds not bad on paper, until you remember that this was written in 1920 and sensibilities of the time meant that things like gay people would have to be punished for being gay, or that you couldn't put a black person in the same sort of starring role a white person would get, because that could upset people who'd never seen a black dude before. It got scrapped in the 1960s (due to the European movie scene having no such restrictions and they wound up basically crushing Hollywoods output for 6 years straight) but was softly derided by movie makers in the decade before that.<p>Up until <i>very</i> recently, an informal version of the Hays Code still existed for syndicated childrens entertainment (if you ever wondered why villains in 90s saturday morning cartoons often ended up being more interesting than the heroes this is why; writers had less limitations writing them compared to the heroes who had to always be morally righteous and upstanding as long as they did a token punishment for the bad behavior at the end. Skeletor and He-Man are probably the archetypical example of that), but that kinda just fizzled out around the turn of the 2000s.<p>The problem with the modern situation comes in when you grapple with the fact that both people and stories are these complex things with lots of different emotions and that nobody is going to be a perfect human. Yet this younger generation wants to have this "perfect" vision in their media because they paid for it. They've been taught "you financially support something you morally agree with", and if something as a result does something they disagree with, it's easier to demand the work to be changed (or vilified) rather than think critically about why they're upset and think about what the author wants them to think about such things.<p>It's how you get things like "villainous character does morally reprehensible thing, clearly the author must support doing this morally reprehensible thing" being brought up as arguments.<p>I don't think it's something to be too concerned about (teenagers believe so much stupid shit, reality will flush most of it out with time), but it's definitely concerning to see this stuff morph into a second call for the Hays Code.
As GenX myself, this resonates. How the generation directly after us embraces the literal opposite of our core values is an astonishing example of human nature.<p>What this essay severely lacks is the recognition that directly between GexX coming of age and these influencers is the dawn of hip hop and the recognition within hip hop that "refusing to sell out" is a suckers game and "getting paid" is everything. Hip hop fully embraces that perspective, and our influencer generation had the dawning of mainstream hip hop during their childhoods just as that message was omnipresent in hip hop.