The death loop of streaming

I believe it was the Blank Check spinoff podcast Critical Darlings who, earlier this month, said that the Oscars this year would feel like a birthday and funeral happening at the same time. Which proved to be extremely true last night.

It was a canonizing moment for directors like Ryan Coogler and Chloé Zhao who finally escaped Marvel purgatory and are now undeniable auteurs. And former Whitest Kids U'Know’s Zach Cregger’s film Weapons helped actor Amy Madigan win her first Oscar in 40 years. What a night for horror movies, in general! In fact, the films that nabbed multiple awards last night — Sinners and One Battle After Another each with four, Frankenstein with three, and KPop Demon Hunters with two — were all unabashed popcorn movies. (Justiça para Wagner Moura e O Agente Secreto.) It should have been a year where we all walked away confident that Hollywood is so back. But the specter of the industry’s uncertain future hung over the whole thing.

This was partly thanks to host Conan O’Brien, who repeatedly took swings at Netflix and Amazon, short-form video apps, generative AI, and the fact the Oscars, starting in 2029, will start airing on YouTube. The final joke of the night saw O’Brien killed and replaced by MrBeast as host. It was all extremely funny, but this feeling — that one version of Hollywood was ending and new, worse one was being born — permeated everything. An understandably giant-sized in memoriam, centered on Rob Reiner and Robert Redford, didn’t help matters. It also managed to leave out a bunch of actors who died this year.

The truth is that Hollywood is not doing well. I suspect the continued meltdown over Timothée Chalamet’s comments last month about how he doesn’t want film to end up a niche medium like ballet and opera is driven, in part, by nervous creatives who feel exactly the same way. In fact, when I wrote about the Chalamet hysteria last week, I didn’t catch that the X post that set off the entire discourse cycle was from Seth Abramovitch, a senior writer at The Hollywood Reporter (thanks for spotting it Garbage Day Discord user cathy). The only thing in Hollywood more in peril than making movies is writing about them! All of us with a real interest in art or culture are going to be ballet dancers soon. And that future, just over the horizon, the one O’Brien continued to thumb his nose at last night, is looking grim, folks.

Writers Guild of America West is signaling they’re ready to strike again, as they try and claw back some basic protections for writers. Of course, major streaming platforms continue to raise their prices and degrade their services. Trump World oligarchs via Paramount are set to acquire Warner Bros. YouTube is dominating American televisions. And work in Hollywood has dried up to such a degree that, per a recent Variety report, actors are taking jobs as fake patients at teaching hospitals. The Oscars will be airing on YouTube in three years, how many will it take for a production funded by a YouTube channel — or airing on one — to win? Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s completely self-financed box office juggernaut Iron Lung wasn’t Oscar worthy, but what about the next YouTuber to try the same thing? Sorry, Baby director Eva Victor got her start posting videos to Twitter and felt like an almost-nom this year.

Ultimately, Hollywood is facing the same awkward, sad, and confusing transition/hollowing-out as every other industry right now, the only difference is we can all see it. The same gravitational force pushing laid off journalists to Substack, indie musicians to TikTok, amateur directors to YouTube, and aspiring actors to, uh… This is actually the question I don’t have an answer to.

Where do all the actors go? And where will the actors of the future come from? Acting is actually the art form that has struggled the most in the age of online video. (I have a red hot take that allowing audiences to film live theater the way they do concerts would blast the doors open on this, but I’ll spare you.) Unfortunately, history doesn’t really help us find an answer here. For the last few years, I’ve assumed the current entertainment landscape was an echo of the early 20th century. When vaudeville performers moved to short-form nickelodeons before eventually getting snapped up by Hollywood studios for silent films and eventually talkies. I figured that the stars of the future were currently grinding it out on TikTok and other derivative video platforms and would reinvigorate Hollywood when they finally “graduated” to more serious productions. What’s actually happening is far stranger. The unchecked tech-media monopolies of the second Trump era have realized you can make more money building perpetual and personalized slop machines than trying to create large-scale mass appeal entertainment. Instead of investing in films that stand the test of time, they’ve fully leaned into the death loop of streaming, where the past has no value beyond determining the algorithmic bucket you’re slotted into for the next pull of the feed. And they’re desperate for a future without writers or actors or anyone they have to pay.

And, well, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of people left to give awards to.

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A story published in The Australian over the weekend claims that a “tech entrepreneur” named Paul Conyngham cured his eight-year-old dog Rosie’s cancer after using generative AI to design a custom mRNA vaccine to treat her tumors.

The fact Conyngham is described as a “tech entrepreneur” should, obviously, set off some alarm bells. The generative AI industry should not just be thought of as a handful of large tech companies, but as a lattice of strivers, conmen, and (almost exclusively) men LARPing as tech founders that want you to think an AI chatbot is a tonic that can, in this case quite literally, cure all that ails you.

First, here’s a brief summary of what Conyngham says he did: He brainstormed Rosie’s treatment with ChatGPT, got a team at the University of New South Wales to sequence the dog’s DNA, fed that data into “a whole bunch of different (data) pipelines,” including Google DeepMind’s AI biomedical tool AlphaFold. Once his AI tools landed on an immunotherapy solution he then had a custom messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, vaccine made for Rosie. According to Conyngham, the whole thing cost about $3000 and circumnavigating the ethical approval needed to administer the vaccine took longer than designing it.

So is this all bullshit? Well, Rosie still has cancer. Her vaccine visibly shrunk all but one large tumor. Conyngham is currently working on a second vaccine to target it. And, for as much as he says he loves Rosie, he is absolutely using her a guinea pig here. As is anyone who tries to emulate him. And while X’s various AI guys are all screeching about how this is the future of medicine, Patrick Heizer, a scientist working on gene therapies, took to X to dump some cold water on the whole story, writing, “Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard.”

YouTube long-hauler Hank Green, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2023 and has been in remission ever since, warned against comparing the kind of cancer dogs get to human cancers. “There's nothing wrong with just doing this stuff,” Green wrote. “Though I also am like 90% sure that this guy is setting himself up for a start-up and it is unlikely that future treatments will be curative... just like this one wasn't.”

According to The Information, ByteDance is pausing the global release of their new AI video generator Seedance 2.0 after Hollywood studios, including Disney, contacted their legal team. The app was supposed to launch this month. And while there’s no new official release date, we can assume how this is going to go.

Studios, record labels, and other large cultural institutions are not anti-AI, per se. They simply want to protect their intellectual property and get a cut of whatever money the AI content makes. For instance, back in November, Warner Music Group inked a deal with music AI Suno, adding new licensing options and limiting downloads to paying users. I suspect something similar will happen with Seedance 2.0 — or a knock-off that an American company cooks up while ByteDance is caught in legal limbo.

If you’re imagining a future defined by two sides, AI and no AI, you should probably get used to the idea of there being three lanes: Corporate-approved-and-limited AI, open source free-for-all AI, and no AI.

An intrepid user over on Reddit’s r/linux subreddit built a website called the TBOTE Project, which compiles public lobbying records linked to the slew of age verification bills popping up across the US right now. “What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level,” the user wrote.

The company connected to many of these bills is Meta, which may seem confusing at first glance. But I am coming around to a “schizo internet theory” that is circulating X at the moment. AI has ransacked the internet and filled it with spam, spam is an existential threat to companies like Meta, which both need us to provide our authentic data, and engage with content just good enough to slot ads in between. If they can force governments around the world to legally require age verification on the operating systems of everyone’s computers and phones, they can easily promote human-made accounts and content and continue to track them, while also serving up endless AI slop.

Definitely going to spend some time going through all the records here and if you want to, as well, here’s the Github repo.

Right-wing hobgoblin Laura Loomer was on stage at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi, India, last week, when Indian journalist Rajdeep Sardesai read her own anti-Indian tweets back at her. Loomer sheepishly apologized for her posts and tried to tap dance around the years of racist bile she’s posted online. But, of course, Loomer is a pathological poster and couldn’t help herself fighting with Sardesai on X after the conference, accusing him of being a communist.

The entire episode, though, is really instructive. If you simply read and repeat back irl what these people say online they fold immediately.

P.S. here’s a game that will absolutely give you a headache.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***