The dodo bird is an example of something that was isolated and then got steamrolled when the herd came around.

You can always zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it's not even about individual species but life as a whole. "Hide and isolate and wall off" is not successful in the long run.^ Your only chance is to keep up with the herd.

If we look at human civilizations, which ones successfully isolated and hid from (real or hypothetical) bigger badder ones? Neither isolation nor annihilation is ever a winning strategy. Fear is the mind-killer.

^ Save for things like extremophiles that have found their way into a tiny niche that nobody else wants. They may survive but they don't flourish and prosper.

But with the software, what a lot of even pro DJs and sound guys don't seem to realize is that modern compression codecs are damn good. They represent the cumulative efforts of so many of the smartest audio nerds obsessing over it for decades.

So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival.

This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.

Audio is a weird world where everyone lives in their own experience and the externally measurable things often don't really translate to the visceral experience. So everyone kinda comes up with their own tribal knowledge that's often more superstition than science, and a lot of people just tend to assume they need "the best" in lossless files and analog whatever and gold-plated this and that.

Most audiophiles can't do measurably better than 50% on an ABX test. That test is more about audio compression than cable quality, but there is a lot of superstition in audio.

Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were better or not but I think it's pretty well agreed that (some set of) the big name directors and actors and blockbusters were pushing the art form. And it required those kinds of budgets to pull off, and it was seen as legitimately elite status to be given the chance to do it. The crazy complicated shit they did with practical effects and elaborate set building, for example. Teams of visionaries coming together to build deeply immersive worlds. It was a bleeding edge of art, and it attracted those types.

Read about the making of Die Hard. They're legitimately blowing up and ramming SWAT vehicles into a huge office tower in Los Angeles. Alan Rickman of all people is doing crazy stuntwork with flying cameras and real explosions and everything needs to be timed to the millisecond and executed by the whole team. There is no "do it in post", there is no CGI. And you can feel it.

Some in this thread have made the point that it was wasteful and excessive, and dangerous, and exploited labor, and that is all true, but...it was art.

I'm just curious because, for better or worse, American movies, music, and TV still seem globally dominant from my POV and it'd be interesting to know if and how that is changing. There's kind of a huge moat, other countries haven't built out these global powerhouse media industries.

Another layer of the moat is how much that media and tech hegemony has entrenched English as the global language. Any culture based on a different language is going to have a really hard time getting beyond their borders.

When someone says that the relevance of American media is in decline, that implies that something else is becoming more relevant. There has to be something there beyond "America sucks now."

I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years? What has captured the zeitgeist like The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings?

That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.

I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles.

I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content).

My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.

Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.

One area is "micromanagement." Hundreds of individual units moving and acting independently is very difficult for one human general to track, let alone react and give orders to quickly. Think more about rapid data analysis and surfacing supporting information than it being the singular mastermind behind the operation.

As the article says, it's not a huge quantum leap where it just obliterates everything. It's about just being a little bit smarter, a little bit faster, having that little edge that tips everything in their favor.