WHAT ROUGH BEAST…
Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Ready to merge‽
This past week, I watched Griffin Dunne’s amazing documentary, The Center Will Not Hold, about his aunt, Joan Didion. High recommend. It reminded me of her seminal book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays about California during the 1960s, just as the entire world appeared to be disintegrating around her.
“The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.”
The title was inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming, over which I obsessed during my own chaotic college years.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere; The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”
After watching the documentary, I returned to Didion’s essays, and to Yeats’ poem. Together, they seemed to describe perfectly the state of America in 2024. I will not delve into socio-political themes in this essay, as it is now unfortunately far too easy to offend one end of the spectrum or the other with a simple turn of phrase. However, Didion and Yeats’ work are also quite applicable to the current state of the Media industry, as it sadly continues to fall apart in front of all our eyes.
What became obvious, as I fell down this literary rabbit hole, is that in my reporting from the front lines of the war for our attention, I have, this whole time, been emulating Joan Didion and her commentary from within the cultural revolution of that period. I have been attempting (with far less success or acumen than her) to record the upheaval in our industry, like a fly on the wall of the windowless conference rooms inside Big Media’s corporate headquarters, as the architects of the Media Apocalypse watch the fires they’ve set burn everything down.
Recently, however, I have been refocusing my attention away from the Media meltdown and towards what comes next. I have been using the data at my disposal to map the industry’s trajectory and determine to where all this chaos might actually lead. And this realization reminded me of Yeats’ last line – one that has reverberated in my head ever since the first day I read it:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I am not an overtly religious person. But that metaphor, that incredible turn of phrase which William Butler Yeats wrote, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, asks an essential question about the world and the humans who inhabit it: Now that we have obviously lost all sense of ourselves, what the fuck happens next?
Again, this so clearly still applies, even a century later, to the world as it is today. However, in this space, I will limit its application to the Media & Technology Industrial Complex.
What, after we finish dissembling what we’ve built, does come next? David Ellison believes he knows. Which is why he is trying to merge Skydance and Paramount, with the technology his daddy helped build. Ted Sarandos believes the horizon is filled with ever more expensive, AI-empowered content, played out on a global channel, controlled from Hollywood. David Zaslav pretends to see what’s coming next, but it is very clear, as stated by Bank of America last week, he is flying completely and utterly blind.
I have written in the past about how we fix the things we broke. Today, though, I will endeavor to offer what I believe should come after Media’s current fall – not what will happen (because forecasting the moves of today’s Media moguls is like trying to predict the path of a drunken three-legged cat), but rather what I think ought to happen, in the best interests of our audiences, the entertainment community, and the ecosystem itself.
For context, here’s the very latest Media Universe Map, minted this weekend…
And here, then, are THE TOP TEN MERGERS I THINK CAN HELP SAVE MEDIA:
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