Sturgeon's Corollary: The 10% Is Just Better-Packaged Crap

The enduring wisdom of Theodore Sturgeon, a man whose 1950s observations on the pervasive mediocrity of cultural output remain chillingly prescient, clearly hadn't anticipated the sheer ingenuity of modern branding. His famed "90% of everything is crap" — a mantra whispered by anyone who's endured a mandatory office meeting or scrolled through social media — often overlooks the crucial distinction: the remaining 10%.

The real revelation isn't that a small fraction escapes the sewage-strewn landscape, but that this elite sliver is merely crap adorned with sequins. It's the difference between artisanal, free-range crap and the mass-produced, industrial variety. Thanks to the marvels of contemporary marketing and packaging, discerning the truly valuable from the merely well-presented has become a futile exercise for the average consumer.

Perhaps Theodore Sturgeon himself, vexed by critics dismissing his beloved science fiction as part of the inevitable garbage pile, would have appreciated this nuanced degradation. The problem was never the quantity of dreck, but rather the failure to recognize that even the "good stuff" is often just yesterday's trash, meticulously polished and sold at a premium. The struggle is no longer against the bad, but against the impeccably curated bad.