#so tl;dr modern genre lacks the spirit of munchkinry

[arbitrarygreay]

There have been a few posts about how the populace is getting less tech literate, linked to how corporations do everything they can to prevent right to repair, moving towards everything rented, nothing owned. People have an increasing complacency with black boxes. Rewatching Firefly, I notice that this has rippled into how fiction is written. Genre fiction now assumes very little experimentation, development, or subversion of existing world-building items. Characters use pre-packaged and established systems. They research old spells and texts, but don't make up new ones. They buy or quest for existing weapons and armor. They work for consolidated institutions with long history. In contrast, Firefly is centered on characters who are outside the system in every way, and this is etched into their home ship. They've modified that ship, breaking every warranty, rebuilding its equipment to customize and optimize it, so it could never be serviced by any factory mechanics. The scene that inspired this post involves Wash hovering the ship right below an elevated building so that Kaylee can stand on the ship's surface and interact with something on the building, and there are lots of cutaways to a cockpit alert screen warning about the ship's proximity being 3 meters or less. This indicates that Wash and Kaylee disabled any sort of software preventing them from violating a minimum proximity distance, in addition to tuning the ship so that they could handle it with such precision in the first place. This is "build your own PC, write your own OS" stuff, taken as the lifestyle the audience is meant to relate and aspire to, and contrasted with the clean pre-packaged Alliance technology that they're hacking to rob. The Internet of Things is just as exploitable in the space future, and needing to have physical access to the thing they need to hack is the best form of security that provides necessary tension and plot complication. I can't remember any recent show that has displayed this similar kind of Linux spirit. Even when you have crime and heisting, characters are plugging in pat little unit hacking programs that are functionally no different from magic spells. There's no sense of building and DIY and counterculture that would separate them from the kind of assets their enemies have, or how said assets would be deployed. But hey, what do you expect when professional video creators are all locked into Apple or Adobe ecosystems? The requirement for serialized storytelling also kneecaps characters from simply earning their daily bread (and so a focus on process over ambition), instead of being required to chase career paths with Vision, achieve financial growth or be strangled. Which means that characters have to exit the show when they achieve stability, and so the writing for ensembles has evaporative cooling to only the ones who refuse to get off the Carousel of Bullshit. We can no longer have shows where people solve their problems as the meat of the story. Going back to the comparison to technology, corporations just keep ratcheting up the exploitation, but network effects means that getting off the escalator puts you out of sight, out of mind, not a competing alternative. See for example the mobile+appification of the internet.