AI (Sora, Runway, Midjourney) will not replace human creativity, but it will replace the drudgery . Indie filmmakers will generate backgrounds. Musicians will generate stems. Writers will generate outlines. The cost of production will drop to near zero, leading to an explosion of quantity, but a premium on authentic human quality.
In previous decades, popular media was defined by "appointment viewing." Families gathered around a television set at a specific hour to catch a sitcom or news broadcast. This era was characterized by a limited number of gatekeepers—major networks and film studios—who decided what stories were told. Freeze.24.03.02.Emiri.Momota.A.Quiet.Place.XXX....
The keyword has shifted from broadcast to engagement . Popular media is no longer a monologue delivered from Hollywood to the heartland; it is a dialogue, an argument, and often, a chaotic mosh pit of competing voices. AI (Sora, Runway, Midjourney) will not replace human
You don't have to play video games to talk about them anymore. Thanks to adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout (Amazon Prime), gaming lore is now mainstream pop culture. Writers will generate outlines
Substack, Patreon, Twitch, and Discord have built the infrastructure for this new middle class of media. The "Long Tail" theory, popularized by Chris Anderson, has finally come true. The economics are brutal at the bottom, but rewarding at the top.
To understand where we are, we must look back at where we started. For decades, entertainment content was defined by scarcity and scheduling. In the golden age of television, popular media was a "lean-back" experience. Networks operated as gatekeepers; there were three major channels, and the entire nation tuned in to watch the same shows at the same time. This created a shared cultural monoculture—everyone knew who shot J.R., and everyone discussed the finale of M A S H* the next morning at work. Entertainment was communal, scheduled, and finite.
For a few years, everyone wanted their own Netflix. Now? The market is correcting. We are seeing the rise of (Disney+, Hulu, and Max) and the return of ad-supported tiers.