Going Backwards

I see that yet another of Elon Musk's rockets exploded the other day.  How many is that now?  I've lost count.   You know, I can remember the days when rocket launches seemed to be just routine - they blasted their payloads into space without blowing themselves up over Florida.  But that, of course, was before it was decided that private billionaire crank cases like Musk were a better option than bodies like NASA or the ESA, with their decades of experience and expertise, for the exploitation of space.  They could do it all better, cheaper and more efficiently.  Except that this 'step forward' seems to involve taking several steps backward - back to the days of exploding rockets which were inherently unfit for their primary purpose.  Which seems to be the story of our modern world: we seem to continually going backwards, abandoning the tried and tested in favour of going back to policies, technologies and ideas that were proven undesirable or unworkable decades, centuries even, ago.  So we have Trump trying to drag the US (and the world, by extension) back to the nineteenth century in terms of economics, foreign and social policy, Starmer trying to drag the UK back to a world of Thatcherite fiscal targets and spending restrictions and Putin trying to drag the world back to the Cold War.  It's like the lessons of previous decades have suddenly been forgotten.  History?  Who needs it?

But it isn't just in the world of politics and technology that we seem to be going backwards.  Even in the more trivial matter of entertainment, innovation is increasingly being sacrificed on the altar of profit.  Why take risks on something new, when you can instead flog to death a tried and tested format or property.  In the cinema, we get served up endless remakes and sequels instead of anything new.  It's the same on TV, with the streaming giants who now dominate production trends with their money, giving us a diet of movie spin-offs and remakes, 'reimaginings' lof old series that nobody asked for, shows that are as much like other successful formats as possible without invoking copyright laws and stuff hijacked from poorer terrestrial networks that paid for their development into successful formats.  Again, little in the way of originality,  Even when something new is tried, if it isn't an instant success, the streamers will unceremoniously axe it.  Never mind nurturing and developing new stuff - if it doesn't make a buck from the start, it's of no use to them.  But this constant looking backward also increasingly affects established TV shows on conventional networks, with their growing reliance on call-backs to previous episodes and characters to cover up a lack of innovation.  

It's a lazy way to try and please existing fans but ultimately makes it more difficult for new viewers to get into the series without laboriously sitting through every previous episode.  The idea of the 'casual viewer' seems to have been discarded, or forgotten about, in this era of streaming and 'binge-watching', (I'm afraid that I don't have the patience to sit through sixteen consecutive hours of a TV show just to be able to understand the current episode).  Publishing is no different, with High Street bookselling dominated by a handful of big players, who only like to stock the tried and tested via a few established distributors.  Increasingly, they don't like to have names people won't recognise on their shelves, hence the current slew of titles, both fiction and non-fiction by TV personalities and the like. It doesn't matter whether they are any good, people will buy them (they hope) on the basis that potential readers like the author's TV show.  (I'm actually a terrible snob in this respect, refusing point blank to buy and read anything by a 'celebrity').  Again, it raises the question of just how anyone is expected to break into writing if they don't have a track record of already being famous for doing something entirely unconnected.  Self-publishing?  Largely a con, in my experience - plus, most of the self-published stuff I've encountered is pretty dreadful, testimony to the value of experienced editors and proof readers.  Will we ever stop this backwards movement to old ideas and formulae and start progressing again?  I honestly don't know.  Sometimes I fear that we're unwittingly wandering into something like Philip K Dick's Counter Clock World, living our lives backwards, disinterring the dead rather than burying them, getting younger instead of older and watching every human achievement progressively erased as we move backward through our history.  Sheesh!  What a depressing thought for a Monday!