alphas

The saying "A Jack of all trades is a master of none." mostly because it implies that there isn't value in a diverse set of skills. My understanding is, however, that the whole saying is "A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one." It's unclear why this phrase was shortened, but you can't help but see how its usage in the media lends to the notion that one should specialize instead of generalize. Something that directly supports the higher education structure and track post primary school.

Personally, I've made a pretty successful go at generalizing within my field, so I definitely resonate with this one.

The concept of "Stockholm Syndrome". Britannica defines Stockholm Syndrome as follows:

Stockholm syndrome describes the psychological condition of a victim who identifies with and empathizes with their captor or abuser and their goals. Stockholm syndrome is rare; according to one FBI study, the condition occurs in about 8 percent of hostage victims

This concept is widely excepted as a kind of mental breaking, of someone doing something that would appear illogical or irrational. However, the coining of this notion stems from a bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973. I'll simply link to the backstory from Wikipedia, as it encapsulates the issue pretty well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome#Stockholm_bank_robbery

The movement towards CGI in film, while pioneered by studios such as LucasArts and Lightstorm, has mostly been driven by the ability to reduce movie insurance costs for actors and crew. When James Cameron especially pioneered CGI in film for Titanic, he saw CGI as a way to enhance physical props, models, and locations, bringing a physically shot scene alive with details. George Lucas, on the other-hand, saw a potential to create from whole-cloth entire worlds of imagination rendered entirely digitally. Insurance companies, on the other hand, saw the potential to completely reduce liability for physical shots. Why use a blank that can kill someone (cough Alec Baldwin cough) when you can use a digitally rendered blast. It's why a big part of Christmanism is looking for a comeback of squibs, to fight against the base of capitalism.

However, while it begins as a conscious move from the base it becomes an unconscious move because eventually this mentality begins to seep into everything, as people are trained with these new techniques, old ones are forgotten, which influences what stories are told and how they are told. And it's not always all bad. Suddenly everyone was obsessed with multiverse theory in film because we could use these now well understood and widely taught CGI techniques to create these different spaces more affordably and 'real' than actual physical spaces ever could, which also converged with everyone feeling like everything is getting shittier from the base and attempting to imagine a better world, this reflecting the sentiment of the base in the superstructure, using techniques created by the base that had seeped into the superstructure.

It's all very cool, very nerdy stuff.

Flat earthers becoming a thing and the book 'The World Is Flat' by Tom Friedman published in 2005.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

The idea that handcrafted goods are superior to factory-made ones. In our society this perception is primarily driven by two things: that cheap goods are always factory made (because it simply isn't economical to handcraft IKEA-tier furniture), and that hand-crafted goods often have to justify their increased price by being luxury items (since luxury items' prices are a lot less tied to their inputs than other classes of commodities). Something made by hand isn't necessarily better than something made by a machine, but there's certainly a recurring idea that it is in pop culture.