I kind of miss gatekeeping.

With Rings of Power finishing its second season in a spectacular fashion (I really enjoy this beautiful show), I started to think about all the review bombs and the multiple ways in which internet trolls tear down these kinds of programs. Oh how far we have come since the early 90's and late 80's.

We live in a time where the worst people have internet access and dwindling, bordering on non-existent, levels of shame. Back in the day, if some sad sack loser wanted to vent about Spider-Man getting married, that dude had to write or type a letter. Then they had to address and stamp an envelope, and then mail said letter to an editor, and then wait months to see whether anyone read their deranged ramblings (or whether it was even printed). This is how things were done.

Now? Not only can the same type of loser set up multiple alts to review bomb a show they haven't seen 50 times before breakfast, but said loser has successfully lost the ability to understand how incredibly weird and damaged that behavior actually is.

I didn't realize at the time (as I was living through it), but there was a ton of gatekeeping in just about every aspect of life (and maybe that was a good thing). A lot of it was unintentional gate keeping. Things were difficult to get done (and expensive) because we simply didn't have a better way. If you wanted to publish a manuscript, it needed to be typed on paper. Once you did that, you needed to find an agent, because an agent was the only way you were ever going to get a thing published. Once you had an agent, then you could get in front of a publishing house. They wouldn't publish your work if it wasn't "good" and it was up to the agent to figure out if something was good enough to warrant a look at. There are tons of other examples of this kind of gatekeeping.

If you wanted the news, there wasn't 24-hour news. You just had to tune in to channels 3, 6, or 8 (out of a maximum of 12-13 channels) on an old tv, and you just had to consume what was told to you by Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow. Once the news hour was over, that was it. You could get some news out of a printed paper, but that required a delivery person and a subscription. My dad would go to the library once a week to read The Wall Street Journal to get the news from New York and see what was happening in the world of stocks and bonds. The writing in the journal was always fantastic, and they always had pictures of people they were talking about made in curious black and white pixelation. Knowledge came from textbooks and encyclopedias, and not from iPhones. If you didn't have an encyclopedia, you had to hit the sidewalks to go to the library and look up things there and take notes. You might be asking: Mike, why was this better?

Well...it wasn't better in the sense that knowledge was hard to obtain. But forcing people to jump through hoops to get a thing also ended up making it much more difficult for everyone to start hating each other for "reasons." Having a filter that only allowed some things through would also set up those who made it to the other side with reasonable incomes. If you were a writer and actually got published by a big publishing company, you could make a career out of that pretty easy. If you were a person that actually managed to get some music published, you would probably be setup for life doing music as your career. If you studied art in high school and college and somehow got hired to do a book cover, you could actually make a career of being an illustrator and gain some notoriety and fame. In a time when people couldn't just blather whatever madness is going through their minds, things like debate and debate performance actually mattered. If you did poorly in a debate, then you probably wouldn't get elected. Nowadays? I don't think that debates actually mean anything. It's like a parade or a show...it's pure entertainment and that's it. Nobody cares. People have already decided long before a debate who gets their vote. Back in the day...being an expert in something actually mattered. But in our land of "everyone has the same platform and can say whatever they want," the experts get labeled as "well that's your opinion," and then some jackass can say whatever they want to say and "this is my opinion and it carries the same weight as yours because I too can publish and make a video."

Now, I totally realize what I'm saying here, and it actually goes against what I would ideally want. As a person who typically gets the short end of the stick, I love that I can actually publish whatever I want and not have to be gate kept by someone (and prevented from having my expressions read). But because I can do this, everyone can. And maybe this is kind of bad for society. Gone are the "water cooler" type discussions I had with people in the past about books I've read thinking that someone else has read the same book. I very rarely come across anyone that has read the same books I've read because there is no central authority telling you what books are good and forcing people to read those books. People no longer know how to structure a sentence. I see grammatical errors and spelling errors all the time, and no one cares because the gatekeeping is gone. There are no consequences for being a bad speller or using improper punctuation. The consequences used to be that maybe you'd get a terrible grade or maybe you wouldn't get published. Well, there are so many people with degrees these days that its hard for any of them to find a job. And if a publisher doesn't publish a book, who cares? You can just go on Amazon and publish away with ai artwork for a cover. It used to be that you could have a certain kind of respect for "knowing things." These days, you can be a complete ignoramus and just use google and know things the same as someone who spent four years studying a subject.

Before this "rant" gets too long in the tooth, I want to end by saying that none of what I might miss from the days of yore actually matters (as we live in 2024). Access to all information whether it is truth or lies is there for anyone to consume. So it doesn't matter what I think. However, I kind of see modern society as a huge pond now, whereas before it was separate rivers and canals that you had to try and get access to. Because it's a pond, there aren't any preferential areas where the water is clean and pure. If a person on one end of the pond pisses and poops in it (or pollutes it with gasoline), then you eventually get to deal with it on your end. There's no "jumping to another water source," and its actually impossible to keep your side of the pond clean. No matter what, the filth gets in, and whether you like it or not this is the water you drink now. It doesn't feel like this is a better way.