Amerika

Here you will often find reference to means-over-ends versus ends-over-means. Ends are goals, correlated with intentions, and means are methods, which reflect past convention. Ends are tradition, means are pragmatism.

The problem with means-over-ends is that by focusing on method, it eclipses goal; ends-over-means on the other hand orients toward a positive goal, meaning something to be achieved. Means-over-ends replaces the positive goal with negative impulses, namely avoiding taboo methods (eugenics, paganism, authoritarianism, carnivorism).

We can see this play out in the business world through the tragedy of the shareholders who, by insisting on a method (increase stock price) miss out on the business goal (position for future products):

Per attributes that corporate agility to Mac Baren being a family-owned business, rather than one with shareholders anticipating quarterly returns. “When you have to perform every quarter,” says Per, “sometimes the decisions you make are not the best for the future, because you need to show immediate profits. We don’t have that pressure. So if we have an idea we think will be good for our future, then we do it without thinking about what will happen to this quarter.”

The problem with shareholder rule is that it focuses on the last successful method and not why it was successful. For example, John Williams style soundtracks may work for certain types of video games, but if those become a big success, the entire industry emulates them out of fear of not competing.

Similarly, when “found footage” movies became popular in the wake of The Blair Witch Project, for a time just about every movie used the found footage technique. Now that AI is popular, almost every company is incorporating it into their products whether related to the use/goal of those products or not.

This type of lowercase-c conservatism dominates the industry because goals are hard but methods are easy. The shareholders will punish anyone who does not do what is working for others, because in the short-sighted method of voters everywhere, they want “their share.”

In video games, this manifested through soundalike music based on what succeeded in the industry previously:

Uematsu compared the situation to the game music industry back in the NES era of the 80s. Back then, few composers had their eye on making music for games, but that has changed dramatically over the course of Uematsu’s career.

According to Uematsu, the industry has gone from giving game composers little attention to stifling composer’s creativity or pushing them toward a narrow type of sound (often a John Williams style). As a result of that, Uematsu added that, “Frankly speaking, there’s less ‘weird things’ now.”

Through this method, whole industries clone themselves to death and in doing so, drift away from the actual goal of the product like providing an enjoyable game. Instead they have a laundry list of things that worked for others, and they cram these into every product, adulterating the character of those products.

The same thing happens in societies. When something works for a nearby society, regardless of different context or aims, the voters/shareholders will punish anyone who does not clone it. As a result, societies follow the same patterns, even when this defeats their own purposes.

Tags: crowdism, democracy, ends-over-means, means over ends, shareholder capitalism