... is there some non-censorship way - no government oversight, no "industry" review board, etc. - to have social standards that don't result in our pop culture dominated by junk and the default setting for many to be cynical to anything that feels "highbrow" or "uplifting?"
..... Is there a way for these not-top-down, not-forced norms to steer us toward a less-tawdry mass-market culture than we have today? Maybe not, and if the only alternative to what we have today is forced censorship, then I'll take what we have. It's just that on my more-positive days, I like to think there could be a better outcome.
Fading Fast - about 15 years ago I turned my back on television and pop culture. I didn't watch television nor buy newspapers when I was 16, and I decided that I wasn't going to be a part of the modern throwaway culture.
We can retreat; withdraw, and isolate ourselves in little bubbles like this. I tried this, much like many an American hero emulator of Henry David Thoreau. After all, transcendence is what we all want, even if we do not acknowledge the need in us.
The subculture and counterculture forms its own culture: the exiled out-groups become the in-groups from which other exile-groups spring. We have a cultural relationship with our society, which is more diffused with the breakdown of the global barriers with the internet.
Consequently, the critical faculty of being able to discern within culture, spawns its own market. We see the rise of the counter-culture sub-culture (I like Edward's description of the Young Fogeys, rebelling against the era where technological dehumanisation commences, which itself is supplanted by the Anarcho-dandyists). Now, we are at the point of curatorship.
Curated shops, selling us what has been carefully filtered and selected for us. As if we are idiots who cannot choose and pick for ourselves? Not really. These curated shops, filter out what we already do not want. They filter in, our similar interests, and so we have a new relationship with curated materialism. Our local film society like the NFT can produce their annual agenda and we participate in that as a part agreement of that curated mass. Or we leave it.
Same with the film industry: when there are no moral guides (such as parents, or the Catholic League of Decency), we have moral relativism where anything goes and unthought appreciation of a blockbuster film, confuses artistic creative cinematography for something of less aesthetic value with more entertainment value. The moral arbiter of what is proper or good, then becomes "I". Not the Catholic League of Decency. "I" however is not reflexive, and cannot see through its own biases and prejudices, which means if "I" am the one who decides rather than forced authoritarianism, "I" risk being lost in a sea of bad choices.
In an individualistic libertarian society (is that America?), freedom to choose is privileged over making the right choice for the greater good (communistic utilitarianism).
I actually like having a list of authoritarian agreed standards: that way I can seek out the underground black market banned films easier