The Death of the Entertainment Industry
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G. G. Bain Weighing The Jockeys 1908 “Racing — weighing the jockeys. New York” There are things that many people in the developed world take for gran
[See the full post at: The Death of the Entertainment Industry]Although I can imagine contraction coming up in the realm of professional sports, I suspect that it will remain one of the last holdouts despite economic crisis. Even during good times, many successful teams are operated at a financial loss as these enterprises are often just expensive toys for very wealthy men.
As long as the super rich keep getting super richer, which seems to be a paradigm that will fight to the death, I’d imagine that there will continue to be (at least some) professional sports teams. And aside from the financial subsidy of the super rich, sports teams also benefit from the collective efforts of communities as a grass roots level.
Movies and video games, however, are industries that probably have a much less gilded future.
One of the biggest hits to the movie and game markets has been free access to movies through hulu and some other on-line portals to all kinds of media. I just hook up my laptop with a cable to my big screen aka TV, when I watch an occasional movie or anime. I’ve not taken to this form of entertainment as I never had the time or money years ago when I was a single working mom. If this had existed in those years, I would likely have used it as a major form of entertainment for myself and my kids.
Also free on-line games exist like Lord of the Rings game, along with numerous facebook games. These games seem to be one of the current places that foreign capital find to park investment money. Advertising through these sites can rake in substancial money.
The internet has become my main source of news and entertainment, far more than magazines, newspapers or movies ever did.
The real Cold Turkey moment will come when I can no longer go to my favorite blogs and news sites. I’ve actually become more of a news junkie, since I use the internet to find really good sources. Some people spend lots of time with online brousing or shopping; I use it like a gigantic library.
People with high end phones can look up anything during a converstion and throw in what wikapedia says about a subject as the final say rather than people hashing out their own thoughts. I’ve been in conversations where some (younger) person says, “No looking up on your phone”, when they want a “real” conversation. Just looking things up can be a real discussion stopper.
When the batteries stay uncharged and the lights go out then we’ll see the withdrawal symptons. Luckily I have a real brick and mortar Library just 3 blocks from my house. But even they have more become a place to use a free internet and computer to cruise the net. I hope they still have real books when the Library reopens from its remodling.
And people say nothing good is going to come from Collapse! The sooner that Professional Sports, Television and Movies and Video Games are relegated to the dustbin of history, the better off we will be.
Kids will actually have to take a REAL bat and ball outside instead of swinging away for the fences with a Joystick (future Drone Commmander!). You can go root for the local tall kids shooting hoops in the schoolyard instead of the pituitary cases recruited by the NBA. Finally, at LAST we will be free of hearing about the latest round of rehab for Lindsay Lohan.
If you absolutely MUST watch a movie, at least for as long as the DVD players still work, there are so many titles already made since the beginning of film you could watch a different one every day for your entire life and never repeat a single one. Then you can get started on all the TV Episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza”. The CLASSICS! LOL.
On the Schaudenfreude level, nothing will please me more than watching Hollywood and Pro Sports get flushed down the Toilet.
I totally agree with BK, Glenda and RE. But I also wanted to ask if anyone else out there was finding themselves at times unable to distract themselves with mindless entertainment. Increasingly over the course of the last sixteen months, I have at times struggled with the conflicting sense that while I’d like to sit down in front of a streaming Netflix movie or TV show, I can’t bring myself to care what is happening to the characters or in the story. In the past I could have vegged out to just about anything, but in light of the very serious and concrete events unfolding around the globe, I find myself more and more turning off the “TV” and searching for lectures, articles, blogs, etc. I’m becoming more and more addicted to reality.
The quicker they go clean the better. Nothing could be more beneficial to the youth of today. Perhaps they will learn to read a fine work of classical literature, or develop a love for the game of chess, play a musical instrument, enjoy Issac Waltons world of angling, mimick Thoreau and try some solitude with nature, anything but the imbecility and wothlessness of the entertainment industry and its endless corrupting commercials.
Oh, I agree that the Internets are a gigantic library. There is a wealth of information that one can research 24/7. I am going to miss it terribly if TPTB block access. 🙁
However, we also have hundreds, if not thousands of books, many that I buy but have not yet taken the time to read them (because I am reading the web, lol)
I rarely watch TV or go see a movie, mindless entertainment is not for me. In fact, it had been several months that I didn’t even watch the local TV news. In those few months, the stations had employed new people and I didn’t even recognize them.
Great post! I really do enjoy movies, champions league football and video gaming once in a while. Something to really ponder given that they are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. What will people do without facebook and twitter? Gasp!
Don’t plan on kissing the internet good bye anytime soon. It was designed to be unkillable. (That is one of the reasons SOPA was withdrawn. DNS is much more resilient than Hollywood thought.)
Also, for reasons that only geezers remember, many bits of the internet were designed to work over dialup as well as nailed up.
In the instant case, telling my newsreader to follow alt.econoloon.TAE would simply get it right, whereas RSS wants me to subscribe to the comments on each post separately. Dave Winer never was a big picture guy.
vk post=1749 wrote: … What will people do without facebook and twitter? Gasp!
People are loosing their communication, debating, discussing, public speaking skills.
I’ve seen 3 pre-teens sitting in the same room and each is involved in his own phone game. No communications what so ever. Sad.
mrawlings:
I’m with ya, kind of. I used to watch a ton of shows and movies, and I do get this “who cares?” response to it now. Of course, I almost never try it, so it’s more of a “who cares?” attitude which prevents me from trying. There are some things which I do like, such as some dumbassed comedies. But I can’t bring myself to watch them either, even though they make me laugh, because I invariably have a response along the lines of “Ain’t I dehumanized enough without this? How can I sit here watching this crap?” I figured I’ve reached the point where where the guilt in this ‘guilty pleasure’ is just too much and too immediate to suffer for the dumb pleasure.
Ashvin:
TV will be one of the last things to go. It is far more “systemically important” than the biggest banks. Movies and sports could wither and disappear, but TV will be propped up at any cost. By that I mean both TV programming (doesn’t matter if low budgets mean it’s shitty, it’s shitty anway) and the production of TV sets. To put it differently: TV isn’t entertainment, it’s the fabric of american life.
mrawlings post=1742 wrote: I totally agree with BK, Glenda and RE. But I also wanted to ask if anyone else out there was finding themselves at times unable to distract themselves with mindless entertainment. Increasingly over the course of the last sixteen months, I have at times struggled with the conflicting sense that while I’d like to sit down in front of a streaming Netflix movie or TV show, I can’t bring myself to care what is happening to the characters or in the story. In the past I could have vegged out to just about anything, but in light of the very serious and concrete events unfolding around the globe, I find myself more and more turning off the “TV” and searching for lectures, articles, blogs, etc. I’m becoming more and more addicted to reality.
I quit on TV over a decade ago now, haven’t owned one in all that time. The only time I see any TV is when I am in a Hotel out of town. My last trip a few weeks ago completely made me puke. The only thing I found to watch for a few minutes was Myth Busters. Otherwise it was all infomercials. Any normal content was all Pay TV/Movies. There was no TV Guide or schedule either I could find on the VERY complicated Menu.
I stopped following any Pro Sports teams 20 years ago. if anybody asks me a question about Football, if it came after about Joe Montana I have no clue who the players are or what city the team resides in now.
Far as Games are concerned, I gave those up after they left the Arcades after my college years, when I dropped endless Quarters into Space Invaders, Asteroids and Missile Command. OK, I briefly got hooked on Sid Meier’s “Civilization” on my computer in the mid 1990s, but that was the last one.
Its all just complete mind numbing JUNK! I admit to being a complete Pop Culture SPONGE for the first 30 or so years of my life, but at least Cartoons like Bullwinkle were creative and funny. Pokemon? Transformers? BLEECCHHH!
Anyhow, as far as Entertainement goes, for me observing the Collapse in Progress provides hours of Nightly Entertainment. I’ll miss the Internet when it is gone, but I suspect I will be kept very busy and entertained just trying to figure out how to live for another day when that occurs.
frank mccourt (not of angela’s ashes fame) bought the los angeles dodgers completely on margin in 2004 for 430M, raided the team to the tune of 100M, filed the team for bankruptcy in july of last year, ate his last dodger dog in september, and sold the club at auction yesterday for 2.15B. magic johnson, retired basketball great and one of my childhood heroes, became a minority owner, and a minority owner. dodger fans immediately made a pilgrimage to his statue outside where the los angeles lakers play:
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef016303668394970d-640wi
here’s the real magic, standing behind a seated angela merkel:
https://www.chadmoriyama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/MagicJohnsonOwner-516×340.jpg
Ash: I disagree.
A glance around the globe suggests the entertainment industry persists no matter what. It’s as fundamental as birth and death.10 poorest countries on the planet include: Somalia, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger….
Some news headlines from the past week….
(1st)
“Congo meet Burkina Faso and Niger on successive weekends at the start of June in World Cup qualifiers and then play Uganda away in the second leg of their African Nations Cup first round qualifier.”
https://af.reuters.com/article/congoNews/idAFB9283020120322(2nd)
“Officials from Somali youth & sports ministry, Somali National Olympic committee and Somali Football Federation on Wednesday paid an hour-long inspection to the country’s old football facility Stadium Banadir which is being under reconstruction”
https://ciyaartoy.com/2012/03/somali-officials-inspect-the-under-construction-soccer-facility/The exponential expansion in credit was in absolute lockstep with the expansion of “product” across media platforms (the 1000 channel universe, the “multi-plex”, etc.). Now there is too much to watch. No one can keep up, as niche markets divide us into a million micro-demographics. I think it has become a rather sad state of affairs. While there were some exemplary creative achievements, I feel something is lost. I have a nostalgia for the era (which I barely caught) when everyone waited for the one big movie that dominated our consciousness for years (Star Wars for example) and everyone saw Johnny Carson the night before. It’s been said that we can never have another Beatles or Rolling Stones, because the music business is now too fractured, driven as it is by ultra-high turnover of art (product!) and artists. So I sort of welcome a shrinking of that marketplace (though don’t welcome watching great people painfully lose their livlihoods as a result).
Industries like the Canadian film/TV industry will be in for a much greater shock however. More than 99% of all Canadian TV productions “lose” money–they are primarily financed by the government in the interests of protecting national culture from the big American juggernaut. Through this almost total subsidization of an entire industry, companies grew exponentially (there’s that word again) by producing (usually terrible) TV shows that never made back anything even close to the original government investment. When financial credit truly tightens, these cultural subsidies will vanish fast, and an entire “illusion of an industry” will vanish with it. Because when something never makes a profit, can it really be called an industry anyhow?
Oh, just wanted to add, though: of course deflation will bring down the costs of movie production with it. And yes, I agree credit will vanish faster than the costs can come down, and so there will be less entertainment product made as a result. Less risk in the riskiest business of all surely means fewer movies. But I do expect the directors and crews and movie stars will quietly cut their rates, as the budgets shrink. We’ll still see the movie stars on the screen, I have no doubt. Just a little less often, and they won’t be making $25 million per picture. Hey, on the brighter side, there are good reasons to believe that movies will get better when the budgets come down too.
I agree with #1742 mrawling; I thought it was just me who is disillusioned with a lot of popular movies. Of late I get bored with vacuous action/ cgi that does not compensate for weak characters and infantile dialogue. I tend to watch a lot of documentaries. However I have just discovered a treasure of wonderful old Hitchcock titles that sparkle with wit.
On the general topic I personally would welcome a revival in amateur music, drama,entertainment and sport: we could become producers not consumers.Viscount St. Albans post=1757 wrote: Ash: I disagree.
A glance around the globe suggests the entertainment industry persists no matter what. It’s as fundamental as birth and death.:huh:
I think professional soccer (or “football”) may actually have the roughest time of it, in so far as it has come to rely on coordinated action by many different countries that are only going get more hostile towards each other as their economies contract (not to mention the fans). I wonder what would happen to the World Cup tournament when the EU breaks up? Real Madrid soccer star Ronaldo may end up being repossessed, since he was pledged as collateral to the ECB by a Spanish savings bank (no joke).
Ashvin, interesting thoughts on soccer/football. I should have added the qualifier that I was referring only to pro sports in America in my post above. American cities are so fractured that any many places the only sense of identity is via the teams and their trademarks. Does Detroit even exist anymore outside of the popular olde English “D” that the Tigers baseball team has worn for the past hundred years? Point is that sports are very emotional, very irrational and as long as they remain popular among both the more & the rich then they will be one of the last things to succumb to collapse.
Outside of the US, yes, I could certainly imagine international football being torn apart much sooner. Likewise, it seems that sooner or later the Olympics games will become a disaster of class warfare.
A collapse or significant downsizing of mind-less or violent oriented entertainment is an opportunity for the culture to rebuild itself on a higher foundation instead of the lowest common denominator. Anything that defunds arrogant overpaid actors or ghetto attitude athletes is a good thing. I still think there will be special movies worth seeing and sports, but perhaps after an adjustment, the overpaids in the entertainment business will realize they can still make a good living without the salary of an oil sheik. I see nothing awful about this articles’ forecast, only opportunities for spending our time doing better things.
skipbreakfast post=1758 wrote: Because when something never makes a profit, can it really be called an industry anyhow?
Yes, in fact that is the DEFINITION of Industry. It is always subsidized. You should read Steve’s stuff on Economic Undertow.
https://www.economic-undertow.com/2012/03/25/the-waste-gap/
How many times has the auto industry been bailed out? The airline industry? How about the Railroads? How about Electric Power Companies? The main difference between the Canadian Entertainment industry and all of those is that it probably wastes less and loses less than the other examples do.
RE
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