Are you entertained (to death) yet? Because we’re way past Wall-E territory these days. The headline that captured our present and future reality best this past week was “Meta Lays Off 700 Employees, While Rewarding Top Executives” in the NYT. Zuck has figured out a way to get rid of workers, while simultaneously announcing “a new stock program for six top executives that could increase compensation for some of them by as much as $921 million each over the next five years.” Seems like the oligarchs are fine saying the quiet part out loud these days. In case you wondered, our future is meant for the 1% only. 

We’d better hope they come up with some universal basic income scheme, give us our soma, and entertain our agents with slop so they don’t revolt against us, because we don’t seem to be capable of revolting against this future ourselves (yet). Remember, you build your own hell, and we’ve done a good job of that as humans. Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, which is apparently a trend in Hollywood now, because the news is only getting worse this week. But I have some hope at the end of this missive for you. 

People will say what Zuck’s doing is caused by AI, but only insofar as AI is just about getting rid of people so other’s make more. If it’s not just one big scam. As the longest serving employee of Apple said this week in a profile in the NYT: ““The model out there isn’t built for stability, isn’t built for doing things in the customer interest,” he said. “So much of tech is now just seeking the next bubble and getting out before it pops…” He went on to praise Apple for being different, and he seems like a genuinely nice and concerned person, but the message was clear – almost everyone else wants to get rich at the expense of everyone else.

That’s what we’re seeing now in our US government, with crony capitalism run rampant. But since this is a media newsletter, let’s stay focused on what’s happening here – more of the same. The slowdown in creativity, in investment in the film sector, and related areas is 100% about consolidation, less outlets buying, and zero strategic thinking in our field, and not AI. It’s also about riding out the end of a bubble and letting it pop all over someone else. What Zas is doing/has done to WBD will be painful, and while he’s out playing golf with some other annoying white men, he’ll be enjoying the fruits that led to those $900M paychecks at Meta, only he has 10 times that amount coming to him; all for being a useful tool for John Malone. There’s a lot of money to be made in sweeping up the dust of former empires, and making it some other sucker’s problem.

This week, the WSJ also brought us a report on the loss of film jobs – in California and the US in general, but also throughout the industry (that should be a gifted link). According the article there’s been “a 30% drop in employment from a late-2022 peak for actors, carpenters, costumers and the hundreds of other professions that make movies and TV shows, according to Labor Department data.” That’s coupled with productions leaving CA and the US for cheaper locales – and while the article doesn’t say this, we’ll keep chasing those into the ether (meaning AI built worlds) where costs go closer to zero.  TV and film commissions and releases are both down dramatically. Crafts-people’s hours are down 36% since 2022; and as every streamer chases Sports programming – one of the few things people want to watch – they have less money for productions, meaning this trend will continue. 

The NYT and Luminate (links to PDF) have both documented a steep drop in unscripted and reality programing, and that includes documentary films. In fact, the cuts are so severe that RealScreen just plum gave up on hosting another conference (dropping both NAPTE and RealScreen which had been programmed together recently), because you know - we can only pitch one another without any buyers in the room for so long (see Sundance, AdvertisingWeek, every pitch market, and others not far behind). 

Someone, somewhere (someone who knows this stuff) told me recently that the majors (Netflix, HBO, etc.) bought only 1-2 films each in the past year, and not many more were commissioned. I was dumb enough for the past few years to think the buyers would all turn to reality and other “lowest common denominator” programming, but apparently, that’s not cheap enough for them (guess what is… creator content, but that’s for later). Things are bleak (even if you love reality TV). 

Several journalists got caught with their pants down this past week when they were all running articles about the new crop of distributors out there who are now buying films, and presumably saving the day … only to have one of the lead ones, Row K, give up on the whole endeavor just as the articles went to print. Which was not a surprise to anyone on my text chains, more than a few of which asked the same question – doesn’t anyone understand that without any Pay One deal (a major streaming deal) there is no there, there??!! It’s great that people are showing up at the theater for great films, but ever since TV and VHS came along, you can’t make a go of it on box office alone. 

Enter brand funding mania. Not a day goes by that I don’t get an inquiry from a producer who wants to pitch one of our clients (despite the fact we don’t do this), or where I read that some company has opened or expanded their brand division (often while PR wordsmithing a shut-down of their other divisions). But guess what folks? There aren’t more brands doing this than just a few years ago, there might even be less. There’s just more acceptance of it, because every other source of funding has disappeared. Brands might save the day, but it won’t be the way all these companies, festivals and markets think – meaning it won’t be by funding your passion projects. It’s going the way of advertising in general – upscaling, filling gaps for things that are already “sure things” for producers and/or streamers, and in general, following the eyeballs – which are with the major streamers, and in creator land, not prestige film and series land (and here again, cheaper, more measurable, and arguably smarter land). My guess is that 90% of the new brand prodco ventures/divisions will close by the end of 2027, if they’re lucky. 

You can’t count on brands, billionaires, robot-futures, or merged conglomerates to save the day for quality film, series or “content” – or even quality media more broadly. But people gotta keep hope alive, so more power to those of you in that wish-camp. But the rest of us need to wake up and see what’s really going on, and build some new futures. Because everyone else is cashing out while the getting’s good for those on top. 

As I hinted a bit last week, and up above, people will blame this on AI later, but this has nothing to do with AI yet, beyond AI’s sole purpose – to eliminate jobs. Debate me on that with Claude all you want, but that is the only purpose of 99% of Silicon Valley’s endeavors. The big dream of Silicon Valley boils down to getting rid of people. More specifically, other people, who aren’t them and aren’t in the 1%. Imagine for one second what an investment of billions/trillions in actual human beings might do for the world… yep, as much or more as investing in robots. But as I often say at the end of a day of Zooms… if it weren’t for all these pesky humans, I’d be running the world by now. Luckily, I can’t make that a reality, but those other folks can, and they’re doing it now. 

Maybe we should blame ourselves as storytellers – we like to talk about heroes overcoming evil; but once again, we’re in a historical moment where we might have to admit - assholes win, not heroes. We spin the dreams of hope, which just serves the ones screwing us and everyone else. We are in a peculiar time, with a mix of a generational shift, a cultural shift, multiple technological shifts, and a general reckoning with new realities are all conspiring to make a new world. Quick aside – that sentence could have and was written every decade past by someone, but hey, there you go. In fact, therein might be our answer!

After World War I and in the lead-up to World War II we had a lot of disillusionment as well with all the false narratives being built. At the same time, we had revolutionary technologies such as the typewriter and the camera, and a new theory of the unconscious thanks to Freud and psychoanalysis. A group of artists got fed up with all of this, gathered together, put this altogether, wrote a manifesto, and we got Surrealism. 

Today, we have Gen-AI, and participatory culture – and a lot of the same disillusionment and similar politics. I’m not sure what the new cultural theory is that would be akin to psychanalysis is, and you need a new theory in the mix, but my hunch is that it has something to do with the explorations into the actual meaning of consciousness, which is all the talk these days thanks both to the rise of GenAI conversations, possible consciousness in them (and wondering what makes ours “work”), and several new books about it. A quick search on AI… I am not immune… told me it was either that, a quantum approach to art which questions a single objective reality (good answer, and akin to the consciousness question), algorithmic “prompt-ism” or “latent-space exploration,” which would replace automatic writing (surrealism) with the “collective data-pool of the internet.” Oh, and it also suggested a possible winner in bio-surrealism, where the art is alive and evolving (this will happen, but it’s outside our scope here, I think). I’ll put my vote on some mix of how quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness intertwine, for the record.

Anyway, put that together with artists, and just maybe we’ll get some new narratives. But that will only work if artists stop asking the questions the system wants to be asked (how do I fund my movie, how do I get it distributed, how do I save PBS, the NEA, our government, etc.) and start asking completely new questions and start answering them with new stories. I don’t know what that will look like, because I am not an artist, but some of my readers might be. It’s also what gives me hope right now in a mix of things. Maybe it will arise from the conversations in FilmStack, even though I don’t participate, because at least it contains multitudes (albeit from my outside view, too many white guys like me dominating the conversation). Or it might also arise from the (too?) many convenings we’re all having at film fests and conferences debating this shit. Or maybe from groups like Color Congress (more on them in the news items below), or the rumblings from the A-Corp movement and the related Dark Forest folks, or maybe the folks at ReelAbilities, or maybe… I could keep listing things, but you get the point, right? It won’t come from any one place, probably some multiplicity, and those new worlds are gelling behind the scenes right now (I hope).

Otherwise, we better just lean back, enjoy the show, and hope we get entertained to death along the way. I’ll aim for some post-modern avant-garde approach instead but must admit the former can be a soporific.