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I don't know if religion will die or not, but I do think that not marking a difference between consumerism and religion and instead acting as though consumerism can or will at any point act as a direct substitute or replacement for religion blatantly disregards how they themselves and everyone else interacts with the world. You cannot be, or even believe that holocaust deniers exist, at the same time that you claim that media conglomerates and global social media influence can control the facets of human behaviour. For there to even be holocaust deniers, they have to disagree with not one, not two, probably over three billion or so human beings on the planet, and every single news source who is reputable in any town at all.

Obviously traditions and shit are going to die out, there's very little incentive for anyone to maintain many of them. I saw a video about some traditional tattoo artist or whatever who was the very last of her kind because she doesn't believe she can pass down this practice to anyone else. Literally the only things that can preserve old traditions and the like are individual curiousity. Individuals deciding to learn the language-like dialect of their region with 500 living speakers. You can increase it somewhat with monetary incentives, but that only goes so far, and those monetary incentives have to come from some person or group of people who hold a personal curiousity or investment in maintaining that tradition. And that is a thing that is very rarely going to happen.

Global internet access creates homogenization. Or at the very least, massively waters down larger regions into a shared set of traditions and beliefs, which is going to erase a large portion of it in the process and only keep the parts that everyone is willing to adopt. But I think just like how you can attribute the bad traits of consumerism to human malice and exploitation, I think it's ridiculous to not believe that conservation efforts and individual human curiousity in many of these things isn't going to keep them, at the very least, documented for those who want to retrace their religious or national or ethnic history or whatever. Mostly anything associated with minor faiths and beliefs is going to die out, as in, people are not going to believe in them anymore. But when it comes to partaking and knowing about their traditions, it doesn't become impossible, but instead becomes a personal opt-in choice, which ultimately I personally don't really mind anyway.

My passion has always been for this among other reasons to popularize these traditions in the same way that the more well-known ones have. Greekshit is being practiced by exactly 0 people, but it's still held in reverence and their stories repeated one billion times per second and will continue to do so for the next several millennia. I think that should be the goal. To induce curiousity. There can have been a rich culture with thousands of stories practiced by a million people in the past over in South America or whatever, but if there's no intellectual curiousity brought forth in this period of time, then it's going to die. It's going to be forgotten and left to rot. But if someone uses that very same consumerist nature to present these stories, or even just the aesthetic of them to new people. To popularize it among people who would never and still will never think about those fragments of the past as something to treat as a religious faith they pray day in and out for. Then, I think, the self-preservation efforts come on their own, because individual curiousity is the lifeblood of making these things become remembered. The goal should never be to keep people practicing a set of beliefs or traditions, but rather to make them aware of their existence. Cultural homogenization only happens because the same stories are told over and over, reworked into different frameworks where Medusa and Saint Martha are a pair of street hookers who meet in a New York bar. But I sincerely believe that people do not want that. People do like familiarity, yes, and reworking things into new scenarios does add a flair that can often serve as sufficient "changes" to feel like something new to people, but I do not think that they are allergic to new things, nor that they avoid them. I just think it needs to be aestheticized, commercialized, shown off, made into entertainment first and a cultural reawakening second. I already ranted about it before how much I loathe the cultural sensitivity attitude when it comes to portraying non-grecoroman or christian or white shit in the media and it's for this exact reason.

That's why I think the global commercialized media conglomerate thing is nothing particularly offensive. Corporations are going to find a way to be exploitative, but there is no incentive for them to "bury culture". They gain nothing from it. The only incentive they have is laziness and unfamiliarity, the desire to not change too much for their audience and expose them to things that are far too unfamiliar and possibly unpalatable. But that stops being an issue when they do become familiar with these things. In fact I think it's already happening. Moana is a textbook case of everything I've said and basically a perfect example of how to handle it, and I can promise you that Maui will be in plenty of "mythological get-together" stories written by kids who are now in 10 years old once they hit 20 or 30 or whatever. It's not because the culture themselves tried to push to keep practicing the tradition, but because the market is homogenized. Because the world is becoming a bigger place, and there are audiences all over the world. The new Asha IP from Disney looks to be the same sort of thing, taking a culture and making it into an aesthetic and entertainment that people can fall in love with and a decade later find themselves wikisurfing over and writing up a little short story or novel. Not even about the mythological figures whose names ended up inspiring different cast members, but just the feeling of the world. The aesthetic that it invokes, the "traditions" that feel appropriate in it. It doesn't even take a massive effort. I can promise you that the OSP video on Anansi is singlehandedly responsible for every single namedrop and cameo and shit that he's ever been featured in afterwards, whether it's directly from someone watching their video or second- or thirdhandedly. Maybe it's just because I hold disdain towards many old people's attitude about the world, but despite hating many of the puritanical streaks of zoomers, and the brand loyalty exploitation that's happening whenever they shit out a dogshit remake or adaptation of something that was once good, I still think these tendencies aren't inherently bad, and bring good things with them too. Zoomers are autistic retards who are culturally oversensitive but that cultural oversensitivity also grants many of them a disdain towards the more mainstream things and makes them pursue some path of autistic uniqueness, that'll end up with them either trying to draw in some style that their particular region used, dress up their characters in their clothes, or make stories with their aesthetic and shit.