The Matrix, with commercials
The difference between mainstream culture and let’s call it sidestream culture - because there sure as hell is no underground (not unless the Mennonites have a punk movement) - is that the mainstream is still predicated on passive consumption of content.
The minutiae of TV characters’ worlds is not worthy of anyone’s attention, and yet: who cares? A very large number of people, apparently, who have all plugged their lives into these mass narratives.
It is as if there were something fulfilling in the collective acceptance of homogenous characters, plots, and settings that are then recycled in one’s own conversations as a dialogical shorthand to reduces our own “content” to mere re-runs.
If that ain’t Agent Smith in Wonderland, then I don’t know what.
