[tokai]

The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.

edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.

[dmos62]

Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.

[esskay]

"Their movies"

Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.

There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.

Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.

Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.

[marysol5]

Still US studios who put their money behind projects.

In reality they're just off-shoring costs, but it's still "American".

[orbital-decay]

Even if that's true, the influence is on the decline. It's a combination of factors: fewer and fewer era-defining works and simply novel messages to tell, franchises sucked dry, games and youtube replacing movies.

[nitwit005]

You can always ruin your advantages. People seem to currently like a lot of US culture and dislike the US (or, it's government at least).

[gverrilla]

Speak for yourself.

[dmos62]

You've not seen Dune?

[Biganon]

I have not seen Dune.

[Idesmi]

Some of us deliberately decide to not consume American blockbuster media.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Less and less though. New-ish Hollywood movies started feeling like a slop before ChatGPT was released with all their endless "Batman vs Pikachu"-likes.

[RankingMember]

Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.

[carlosjobim]

American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.

[everyone]

Yes! thank fuck!