Ah... this isn't a bad article, there's some good stuff here, but it is also really frustrating to read.

> But rather that something in the air—something in our institutions, or our culture—was constraining the growth new ideas.

I mean... no, not in our air. Consolidation. Making movies costs a lot more today and a larger percentage of the big films that are promoted the most heavily are made by rapidly consolidating companies that keep buying their competitors.

After AT&T bought HBO, a month later it said the company wasn't profitable enough and should focus more on mass-market media[0]. Really hard to have a conversation about why we're producing less interesting stuff without acknowledging that the biggest companies in our country who are buying other media companies don't like that kind of content.

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Some of the author's ideas are interesting, but there are two really large factors here that the author dances around a lot but doesn't ever really dig into, and it feels so weird given that they have such a public impact on how content is created vs recycled:

1. Consolidation and stagnation of competition decreases innovation. Media/news consolidation has been a large trend across the entire market. As that consolidation continues, companies find that they are mostly competing on how they monetize and structure themselves, not on the content they produce.

2. An increased focus on unbounded and predictable sources of company growth leads to innovation in market consolidation/consumer predation, not innovation in content. See the AT&T article mentioned above, market investors and company heads are much less tolerant of niches and have a much larger expectation that companies they invest into need to rule the world. It is not good enough for you to make something that is profitable, you need to make a Marvel equivalent.

I'm not saying that none of this is culture, I think culture does play a role in how content (and products in general) innovate. But the market forces themselves are so much more demonstrable than the cultural aspects, and the author feels like they are so close to understanding that -- they're putting out quotes like, "new ideas simply don’t fuel growth the way they once did" -- but the article isn't really connecting those quotes to a larger idea.

So it feels weird to go from saying "new ideas simply don't fuel growth the way they once did", to "is the culture wrong?" No, you just said it. It's about fueling growth, and about who is willing to fund innovative ideas given that they often don't fuel massive growth.

I mean, fine, maybe the reason Marvel movies do well is because consumers have less imagination, whatever. But maybe it's also because those movies have giant advertising budgets and the biggest, most powerful companies spend a lot of time promoting them. Is movie stagnation really being caused by everyone getting old? Or is it caused by having hundreds of billboards about Spiderman thrown in our faces all the time? Is it potentially caused by the sources of our media being consolidated down into a few app stores and streaming platforms, all of which are designed to push users towards popular media and first-party content?

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From that AT&T article again, an illuminating exchange:

> "Also," Mr. Stankey said, "we've got to make money at the end of the day, right?"

> "We do that," Mr. Plepler responded, to scattered applause.

> "Yes, you do," Mr. Stankey said. "Just not enough."

> "Oh, now, now, be careful," Mr. Plepler said.

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[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/att-w...