Interesting post—I confess I have been shocked by the centralization/elite control over huge swaths of the Internet.
I did not see that coming.
Censorship should be treated as a crime against humanity and the censors should be put on trial.
Then independent media will be able to flourish.
Excessive centralization is the root of many problems, simply because power WILL eventually be abused.
Right now the streamers are all losing money. (Netflix is the possible exception.) AT&T just dumped WarnerMedia, which was spun off to merge with Discovery. Disney is bleeding on all fronts. A lot of people who follow the industry much more closely than I do expect Disney and WarnerBros. Discovery to either be swalled whole or broken up and sold off piecemeal?
To whom? Well ... of the current big players in entertainment media arena, Apple, Amazon and Comcast (NBCUniversal, Universal Pictures, the Peacock streaming service, and a dozen smaller brands) have by far the deepest pockets. They can lose billions of dollars a year on streaming and shrug it off. They want to be dominant players in whatever rises from the ashes after all the small players are crushed.
NOBODY in the traditional film industry per se is big enough, by orders of magnitude, to compete in this game. As things stand now, if they survive as nominally independent companies, it will be as “partners” of the bigs — i.e., as captive vendors, like a small manufacturing company with 75 percent of its sales being widgets for WalMart. They will be treated like WalMart vendors, who are relentlessly squeezed tighter every year by a company that really wants to outsource everything abroad to the cheapest source available. And, by the way, “partners” will be expected to toe the line on the bigs’ DEI, CRT, and gender wars agenda.
The biggies themselves are being leaned on by democrat politicos, who hold the regulatory reins, and by the venture capitalists, shadowy Middle Eastern moneymen, and the Chinese. At this point, the tech CEOs don’t seem to mind, probably because they consider themselves full partners with democrat-woke axis of evil. The Borg wants control to be seamless and invisible, but when Blackrock execs start talking publicly about using their leverage to force cultural agendas into movies, we’ve got a problem.
Who else might step in and change the game. Well ... YouTube now has bigger viewership, measured by minutes of content consumed, than any of the streaming networks. YouTube is owned by Google. Google and YouTube are both expanding their footprint as distributors. But Google is not a counterweight to the Borg; it is Borg through and through.
Big tech dwarfs everyone else in the cultural media game by orders of magnitude. I’ve grown solicitous of the independent filmmakers, who continue to do what they have always done. Give me a writer-director team of one, who writes a script and, if it’s good enough, hustles up some actors who want to do quality work. Some of these movies are still made on a shoestring, on a very tight timetable and under spartan conditions. Some of them are very good, and everyone involved is proud of their work in a way that the spandex clowns will never be. But they still have to find distribution, and the Borg is crushing the theaters.
We need to kill the Borg.