Media Is Soft Power - What Everyone Knows And Pretends Not To Know

Earlier this year and again very recently, I wrote an essay about the development of the video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. One aspect about that essay that I believe will be more essential the any other detail is to recognize not only Expedition 33, but most modern video games and media as projections of soft power.

Expedition 33 was presented to the public as a creative work, a regional success story, and a triumph of French cultural investment. And, on the surface, it is exactly that: a French studio, supported by the Occitanie region and validated by the CNC, producing a visually striking title with international appeal. But look beneath the marketing language at the machinery of influence.

The CNC’s funding committee includes industry representatives whose affiliations extend far beyond France’s borders. One of them, Sébastien Tasserie, is tied to NetEase, a Chinese gaming conglomerate with global ambitions. This is not speculation; it is a matter of public record. And it raises the obvious question: whose cultural interests are being advanced when a French state agency delegates its cultural gatekeeping to global corporate actors?

The Occitanie’s involvement is framed as regional development, but the rhetoric is unmistakably geopolitical:

• “creative diversity”

• “regional expertise”

• “prestigious partnerships”

• “economic dynamism”

These are not cultural terms, they are industrial terms. They are the vocabulary of soft power.

And the CNC’s own criteria reinforce this logic. A game must pass a “cultural test” to qualify for tax credits, but the test is not about French cultural identity. It is about satisfying EU bureaucratic categories that designed to harmonize cultural production across a supranational bloc. The result is a system where “French culture” becomes a procedural checkbox rather than a substantive tradition.

This is why Expedition 33 is such a revealing example and why, in my estimation, it was slated to receive so many awards. It wasn’t massively awarded because it earned any of it by merit of it being an exceptional video game, but because it is a product of a hybridized institutional ecosystem.

What you saw at the GOTY show was a celebration of the the convergence of regional economic strategy, national cultural bureaucracy, EU regulatory frameworks, and global corporate influence.

If you take anything away from this essay, it’s this:

The video game industry sees high art as any piece media shaped by any and all prevailing mechanisms of influence. The GOTY, essentially, is a celebration of all political and economic forces that were involved in the funding, the oversight, the cultural testing, the regional branding, and the international partnerships of the game.

And, fundamentally, everyone inside the industry knows this.

The Law of Merited Impossibility

There is a strange, almost ritualized dishonesty at the heart of contemporary media discourse. Corporations openly acknowledge that media is a tool of influence: a means for the projection of soft power, steering culture toward a particular goal. This includes brand shaping and ideological alignment (performative or otherwise).

This isn't hidden. Corporations proclaim what they are doing proudly in investor calls, in trade publications, in policy documents, in the language of “impact,” and “representation,” and “cultural leadership,” and “global reach.” They know exactly what they are doing.

Consumers, meanwhile, insist, often with theatrical indignation, that media is just entertainment, made purely for escapism, and has no political content unless explicitly stated. Many people do not believe most (if not all) media is made specifically to shape beliefs, cultural identities, and social norms. And then, when confronted with any contradictions, these consumers retreat into a rhetorical maneuver that Michael Anton once called the Law of Merited Impossibility:

“It’s not happening, and it’s good that it is.”

This is the governing lie of modern media consumption. It is not ignorance. It is not naïveté. It is a defense mechanism.

To admit that media is soft power is to admit that you are being shaped by forces larger than yourself. It is to admit that your tastes, your moral intuitions, your political reflexes, and your cultural vocabulary are not purely self‑generated. You are continuously being programmed and reprogrammed by people who believe themselves your superiors. And that idea is intolerable to the contemporary consumer who has been trained to imagine himself as sovereign, self‑authored, and immune to influence.

Most people who actually work in media (creators, analysts, critics, marketers, funders) do not have this luxury. They know exactly what media is for. They know that every cultural product is a configuration of power: a narrative, a framing device, a set of assumptions about the world, and a message distribution system. They know that the stories they tell are not neutral and that aesthetics are inherently political. They are well aware that modern culture has been turned into a battleground which is why they readily use media distribution channels as their personal ideological filters. And they also know that any bodies that fund their projects are, essentially, instruments of soft power.

This is why the pretense of “apolitical media” is so absurd. It is a fiction maintained only by those who do not want to confront the implications of their own consumption. Anyone who engages seriously with media criticism such as narrative, structure, symbolism, or cultural context, must eventually confront the political dimension. And, no, I'm not talking about electoral politics, but the deeper politics of power: who gets to speak, who gets funded, who gets represented, who gets erased, who gets framed as sympathetic, who gets framed as dangerous, what values are normalized, what taboos are broken, and what "norms" are enforced.

To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand what media is. Media is not a mirror. It is a lever. It is not a passive reflection of culture. It is a tool for shaping culture. It is not a neutral marketplace of ideas. It is an arena where institutions compete for influence.

This is why corporations treat media as a strategic asset. This is why governments subsidize it. This is why NGOs court it. This is why activists target it. This is why authoritarian regimes censor it. This is why democratic regimes regulate it. This is why intelligence agencies monitor it. This is why cultural ministries fund it. This is why global conglomerates acquire it.

Everyone with power understands what media is. Only the powerless pretend not to.

Expedition 33 is the Prototype of Tomorrow’s Cultural Machinery

Expedition 33 is an experimental slate for how corporations and institutions will operate in the future. It shows us the emerging template: regional governments providing industrial incentives, national cultural agencies offering legitimacy, supranational bodies supplying ideological frameworks, and global corporations quietly shaping the direction from behind the curtain. It is a model in which cultural production is no longer anchored in a coherent national tradition but in a distributed network of economic interests, political alignments, and soft‑power ambitions.

This is the future of media: hybridized, denationalized, and strategically curated. A future where cultural agencies speak the language of geopolitics, where regional development offices speak the language of branding, and where multinational corporations speak the language of cultural stewardship. This is a future where every creative work is simultaneously a product, a policy instrument, and a virtue signal.

Consumers may continue insisting that media is “just entertainment,” but the institutions producing it have already moved on. They are building a world where influence is embedded in every narrative, where cultural output is a strategic asset, and where the boundary between art and power dissolves entirely.

Expedition 33 is simply the first clear glimpse of that world—a test case for the next phase of cultural governance. And anyone who claims to analyze media without acknowledging this machinery is not doing analysis at all. They are reviewing products while the architecture of influence is being built around them.

NEXT: The Poverty Of Our Attention