THEMES and METAPHOR do not work unless you are engaging with a work critically. Before the content event horizon it was not unusual to consume media deliberately, and therefore have the time and freedom from external stimulus to engage your critical faculties and internally reckon with the subtext of a creative work and its position in the metatext.

Now you can (and have been conditioned to) binge every episode of TNG between watching YT slop on the toilet and listening to podcasts while you drudge about at home, without so much as a moment of quiet reflection on what any of it means or how it may inform your own worldview (except that you now have some very detailed “lore” in your brain about whatever nostalgia video essay you just consumed).

Thematic content that is inaccessible to the incurious viewer may as well be an invitation for the clever clogs who picked it up to pat themselves on the back for all the influence it will have on The Discourse. In the attention economy, you must employ an actual hammer to the eyeballs of your audience to transmit information to them.