Entertainment
Exclusionary Gatekeeping Is The Future Of Entertainment
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Even the most optimistic pundits are now willing to admit that the quality of entertainment produced by Hollywood has declined. Many reasons have been put forward for this flagging level of competence, but there’s only one solution: exclusionary gatekeeping.
For more than a decade, the entertainment industry has run entirely on inclusivity. Hiring both in front of and behind the camera has been done with a representation-first mindset, which means everyone must be allowed in to whatever you’re doing, whether they’re a qualified fit for your audience or not.
The Death Of Differences
The same transformation happened in entertainment journalism. When the online movie news world emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was run almost entirely by obsessive fans. I know because I helped build it as the founder of CinemaBlend in 2000.
Sites like CinemaBlend, Ain’t It Cool News, Dark Horizons, Film Threat, The Movie Blog, and others were operated by individual owners who were deeply knowledgeable about the topics they covered. These weren’t corporate brands managed by committees. They were passion projects run by people like Vic Holtreman, Chris Gore, John Campea, Garth Franklin, Christopher Null, and Harry Knowles.
They weren’t trying to represent everyone. They were writing for their audience: hardcore male genre fans.
Over time, those independents were either iced out by algorithms that were sued into promoting mainstream media (this actually happened), or bought out by corporate conglomerates (including Cinema Blend, which I exited in 2015) who ditched the genuine, knowledgeable, gatekeeping fan owners in favor of creating something inclusive. Where those original owners had only hired other fans who shared the interests of their audience, the new owners hired opinion makers who represented everyone and everything, which in reality means they hired people who stood for nothing and no one.
This same process was happening in Hollywood itself. It’s why John Lasseter was fired for giving a hug, and Pixar hasn’t made a truly great movie since. The result in both the entertainment creation and the entertainment reporting space has been a disaster. Box office numbers are plummeting. Viewers now use positive Rotten Tomatoes scores as an indicator for which movies to avoid.
Gatekeeping Is The Answer
There’s only one solution, and that solution is gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is the act of controlling access to an idea, community, opportunity, or resource by deciding who is allowed in and who is excluded.
As part of the push towards radical inclusivity by big corporations and activists, the term gatekeeping has become a pejorative. It’s used as an emotionally charged attack against meanies. Being called a gatekeeper is the kind of thing that gets people cancelled.
But nothing of any worth happens without some form of gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is just another way of saying quality control. Quality control isn’t mean, it’s sensible.
Without gatekeeping, we’d end up with unqualified pilots crashing planes maintained by unqualified mechanics. Without gatekeeping inspectors, the quality of the food you eat degrades, the drugs you need aren’t reliable, and nuclear reactors go into meltdown.
Creative endeavors are no different. Without gatekeeping a new Star Trek show hires writers who know nothing about Star Trek, and then its scripts end up filled with obvious mistakes and terrible plot holes which any fan could have spotted if they’d done some gatekeeping to hire one.
Inclusivity Is Lazy And Destructive
If you have standards and want to keep them, you must exclude people or things that do not meet them. Enforcing standards is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
I require my son to get As in math. To make that happen, I check his grades and help him with his homework when he struggles. If he doesn’t study and fails a test, I have to enforce consequences.
If I remove my requirement for an A, I no longer have to do anything. My son also won’t learn math, but I’ll save a lot of time.
Radical inclusivity is a way of removing standards, a way of deferring responsibility for maintaining quality. It’s lazy and destructive.
Exclusion Maintains Differences And Diversity
Exclusion maintains the integrity of your work, your idea, and your brand. Samurai swords are only Samurai swords as long as Claymores are excluded from being classified as Katanas. Pepsi is only Pepsi as long as you exclude lemonade from Pepsi cans. It’d be easier to fill Pepsi cans with whatever liquid is cheapest and most available, but then it wouldn’t be Pepsi anymore, and eventually people would stop buying it.
Maintaining unique differences is hard, so homogenization disguised as inclusivity allows corporations to take an established universe like Star Trek or Star Wars and wear it like a skin suit, puppeted by inclusive hires (hiring done without relevant standards) who have no idea what they’re a part of, and because they don’t care are totally willing to treat fans like fat, juicy, pay pigs to be farmed for maximum profit. They fill Star Wars up with whatever happens to be lying around, and then play the Star Wars theme music in front of it.
Giant Freakin Robot Is An Exclusionary Publication
Late last year, I relaunched Giant Freakin Robot with a renewed determination to avoid these pitfalls by making this the most exclusionary geek site on the internet. What does that mean? It means we will not work with writers who have bad ideas or ideas that are in direct conflict with the values and interests of our readers. That doesn’t serve them or us.
Specifically, Giant Freakin Robot’s readers are geeky men, and always have been, so that means finding commentators who have the same fundamental world view that most geeky men have. Engaging Alex Kurtzman fans to write for Giant Freakin Robot would make about as much sense as investing in Giant Freakin Robot makeup tutorials.
To serve our audience in this way requires gatekeeping. So we’re contracting with talented freelancers based on exclusion, rather than inclusion, and we’re doing it using this simple ad:
There’s only one required question in the application process, which pops up after you read the ad. That question is: Do you hate Starfleet Academy? Yes/No
We’ve received thousands of applications from writers, most of them recently laid off by struggling, inclusive corporate publications. 95% of those applicants checked No and failed this rather simple IQ test. Their applications were automatically sent to a trash bin.
Before we bring on anyone new, in addition to correctly answering that single question, they’ll have to meet the standards of quality and creativity established by our crack team of genius geek culture commentators. We’ll continue to exclude anyone who doesn’t measure up.
If you want a world free of gatekeeping, go to X for random opinions and watch endless AI slop on YouTube. But if you’re looking for a place that throws out the bad and only keeps the good, then read Giant Freakin Robot. Gatekeeping is our business; it’s what we do.