Future generations will not be able to make sense of the way we have all memory-holed 2020. I have like three particular grievances that will never get a proper airing, and one of the most unique ones is about PBS American Portrait. It might be the thing that totally distanced me from public media in the US.

What is PBS American Portrait? It is the most 2011 project you've ever heard of -- and yet it wasn't created 2020.

The basic concept was that PBS would pay a production company to host a website where people would "crowdsource" template-based videos about what it means to be an American in 2020. As if people don't have other, superior platforms to share their perspectives without constraints. Then PBS paid this production company to edit together some of the garbage into some thematic episodes. And also, because this is supposed to be interactive, they half-assed some "national" events and murals.

I put quotes around "national" because most everything was in NYC, naturally.

The thing that really grinds my gears about all of this is that by 2020 we all knew the problems with the Web 2.0 project that this represented:
- all of the standard critiques of reality TV and "authenticity" apply
- all the standard critiques of platforms and epistemic bubbles apply
And lo and behold, PBS paid this production company a gigaton of cash to make a bland, inoffensive, and thesis-driven piece of shit

The whole thing was funded by a big grant from Target, and you can definitely tell because there's a bunch of shit in this project that smells strongly of American non-profit grift. Take this, for example:
https://www.amacad.org/news/pbs-project-partnership-announcement
By the time a big non-profit is paying a "big name" (big in the world of American 21st C. poetry, I guess) to do something aas useless as a "crowdsourced poem," I want you to think about a nature documentary where hundreds of hyenas feed on a single kill. Feeding frenzy

Everybody got a slice of the grift -- painters got thousands to paint Corporate Memphis murals, NGOs got thousands to host community events, educational consultants got thousands to create fake and stupid lesson plan templates -- and because it had all of the clarity and direction of a feeding frenzy, none of it contributed any vision to the ultimate product. What we got was the most bland, cathedral-flavored left-of-center pablum imaginable. "We're stronger together," etc. etc.

And the thing that grinds my gears the most about this is that the big interactive project -- which was supposed to be a PORTRAIT of AMERICA -- was being recorded in 2020, and yet all that we got was PABLUM.

I think that future generations would really benefit from understanding what 2020 was like! I think that it's going to be really hard to explain to people in the future how we were thinking and interacting in 2020! And yet all that we get from this product is heavily curated TRIPE.