Speaking of the guilds, they’re done for. Their leaders see their position as status, rather than service to their members, especially when it comes to their below-the-line members who pay exorbitant fees just to be props for the vanity of others. Their relevance was based on an industry that doesn’t exist anymore. They will have no bearing on the future, other than to complain loudly about it.
The big-name studios are on their way out, too. Their willingness to throw around billions of dollars to acquire more “content” shows just how economically ignorant they have become, not understanding that the value of their product’s name recognition lies in the talent behind it. You can buy every franchise in the world, but without the architects who built them up, all you have are derelict structures, standing as reminders of what once was. Restoration takes imagination and investment, but the new owners have opted to tear them down.
Letting Go of the Ghost
We can pine for what was possible if they had not; we can critique the prefabricated and hollow imitations that have been erected in their place until Heavenly trumpets sound, but there will be no future in it for any of us, aside from a long and sad daily routine of diminishing returns. We have to let go of what could have been, cherish and celebrate what we can preserve, and learn from what we found most valuable in them, so we can make something new that the next generation can find useful. But we have to drop our addiction to trying to return them to their old glory. It’s killing us. We need to stop.
“Predictions are useless. Hope is not a strategy.”
I think the commentary space is going to change, too. As the digital overlords of the internet continue to tighten their grasp on who sees what, while imposing increasingly censorious rules over what streamers say about their products, and audiences tire of the redundant nature of their favorite YouTubers’ need to feed the algorithm, those spaces will start to dry up soon, too. It seems impossible now, but the signs are there that more and more people are seeing what disconnecting and “touching grass” can do for them.
The same goes for streaming services, too. Netflix may seem like a juggernaut now, devouring IPs and hooking past-their-prime directors into a mainline IV of cash for projects other studios have passed on, but in my opinion, their debt-to-profit ratio can only be sustained for so long as they continue to devalue their platform with disappointing slop and menus that read like the same playlist reshuffled twenty times.
The 100-Year Glitch
That’s not to say that any of this is going away. It just won’t be as big as it is now, and definitely not in a form that is familiar to us. We have to keep in mind, though, that people will always say yes to being entertained, and there will always be artists who have a story they need to tell.
