What we lose when we lose the culture industries

More thoughts on the Oracle Threat

Keeping to a seasonally appropriate spookiness, this edition of the newsletter will be a (unusually non-musical) follow-up to our episode on Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media. There, we we discussed how the Larry-Ellison-backed company swallowed up its much larger partner, and tried to get to the bottom of what the implications of this type of tech-based consolidation might be. If you haven’t listened, you can check it out here.

In the month since, the new ownership’s initial moves have gone, more-or-less, the way we thought they would. Lots of talks about AI-assisted-streamlining. Lots of layoffs. A quick pivot (despite David Ellison’s supposed politics) towards the secret conservatism of the always-offended-“radical center.”

More worrisome, however, is the continued pace of potential acquisitions for the increasingly powerful Ellison family. Obviously, it’s hard to credit any piece of news emerging from the endless, hype-filled negotiations about Tik Tok’s operations in the US. However, if reports are anything even close to true, Oracle might be able to take Trump-ordered control of what is arguably the most powerful media platform in the U.S. for the paltry sum of 14 billion dollars (the company’s reported price, according to J.D. Vance).

This would mark both one of the most corrupt bargains in U.S. history (a president forcing a reduced-price corporate sale and handing the resulting company to his pals is…unusual to say the least) and likely among the best deals in the history of its media. To put it another way—Reddit’s current market capitalization is 40 billion. Pinterest’s is 22 billion. You can make your own inference from there…

On top of this, recent weeks have brought news that Warner Bros. Discovery, the long-struggling and often-merged media giant that owns HBO, CNN, New Line, Castle Rock, as well as the vast IP of the long-standing studio (which dates back to the GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY), is another target for the still-hungry Ellison. If successful, the resulting concern would likely be a major powerhouse, one capable of crossing the line between new media platform and old media standby, while bringing the number of “major” Hollywood studios from 5 to 4. (Already a reduction from 7 in the ‘80s and 6 in 2000). The price-tag for this move would likely be hefty—a deep lift for a rival media company, but absolutely doable for a family with a nearly $400 billion personal fortune.

And here, I think, we get to the crux of the issue—the question of what happens when we lose a culture industry. A great deal has been written, of course, about the dangers of journalism’s declining business model (killed by some combination of Craigslist, Facebook, and the “pivot to video”) and the resulting weakness of what has long been viewed as a major—and structurally inviolable—pillar of American democracy. (This, of course, being a take completely abstracted from the long, variegated, and often inglorious history of journalism in the US.)

What’s been far less discussed, however, is what happens when a similar set of shifts remakes—or entirely undoes—the corporate behemoths that have been responsible for the bulk of American culture over the past 100+ years. If what’s happened to journalism is any indication of the future here, it’s not “Tik Tok Killed the Hollywood Star,” as much as it is “Tik Tok pulled just enough cash away from the industry to render it semi-unprofitable.” To be clear, decline does not equal death. And the question of what degree of cultural power the remainder holds is very much still up for discussion.

Now, sure—there is a bit of "the world’s tiniest violin” syndrome here. Many of these corporations have not always been the best, either to workers or to audiences. And certainly, they are fully enmeshed in American capitalism—profit oriented operations with the bottom line as their bottom line. On top of it all, this is far from the first set of mergers and acquisitions to run through the industry: Columbia has been Sony for decades, and Paramount already TRIED to buy Warner at least once (albeit in a very different regulatory environment).

Yet, I think its dangerous to ignore the potential implications of a move away from a culture industry that operates in and for itself and towards a system in which the decision making behind production is chained to another—and honestly, a very different—set of interests. For all of their downsides—racism, sexism, glorification of individualized violence on the colonial frontier, you name it—entertainment industries like Hollywood (or the major labels) have served as mediating forces for a long-running conversation between American capitalism and the American people. Despite 80+ years of Adornian takes on the structural violence of mass culture, it is still not possible to consistently push a movie (or a TV show, or record) to success by dint of economic force alone. And in a competitive marketplace, in which profits are essential, more-or-less fulfilling (or at least, offering a good-enough, corporate-friendly version) of the audiences’ (already mediated!) desires is still necessary for success—and also, at times, a recipe for cultural change.

This system—out of our control, profit-oriented, always exploitative, but at least tangentially related to the demands of a mass audience—has been the primary producer of American entertainment, and American culture, for more than a century. It really does all the stuff those endless Oscar-time panegyrics about Hollywood movie magic claim—it helps define our dreams, our visions of the good life, our imagination of the basic structures of society. And unfortunately, just because many of those can be bad, it most certainly does not mean that they cannot get much much worse.

That, to be clear, is what could very well be the stakes of what’s happening here. As a society, we have spent the last two decades dumping massive loads of finance- and stock-market-generated cash on tech firms, to the exclusion of basically everything else in the economy. This has created a two-fold situation: on one hand, vast sectors of American capitalism have been (relatively) undervalued, creating cramped opportunities for growth in a changing environment. On the other, we’ve created a set of world-bestriding financial titans with enough cash to, almost single-handedly, purchase a company like Paramount or Warner-Discovery, and then run it without concern for profit—and therefore without any real feedback from the American people.

What does this type of cultural-complex—one that, perhaps, has more to do with the court culture of early modernity than the mass culture of the 20th century—look like? I have no idea. But I really doubt it will offer the forms of industrially-organized but still real avenues for self-expression—or the occasional brushes with liberatory transcendence—that make American mass culture worth loving.

Department of Actual Music:

Saxon: We talk a lot of deeply critical shit on Spotify for good reason. However, sometimes you come across a 39 hour egg punk playlist and you remember that there’s still wonderfully weird things out there.

Sam: Where has Strictly Rhythm been literally my whole life? Ice cold sophisto-house piano, followed by perfect rips from Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4. Ten minutes of Chill AF that I can confirm works on the dance floor.

LUV,

Saxon and Sam