Warner Bros Discovery

Warner-Bros Discovery is one of the five big Hollywood Studios, has a wealth of classic films, and is the #3 streamer.  It's already as big as any such thing needs to be.  All the previous mergers and acquisitions which produced the present entity led to a decline in production and production quality.  And yet, the Board savors more.  Why?

It's already been at the point where it can collect ever greater monopoly rents.  The board is hoping to merge it to become an even bigger monopolist, which raises the present value of the current monopolies (if nothing else).

IOW, what they're selling is monopoly itself.

This should, of course, be illegal.

And then there's Netflix and Paramount, which ought to be forbidden from buying rival giant companies in the hopes of even greater monopoly than they already have.  Netflix is already the top streamer, who would be buying the #3, and then they'd own all the content other streamers rent from Warner-Bros Discovery.  Paramount would put half of Hollywood under one right-wing family.

For a long time, anti-trust enforcement relied on the bad doctrine that where greater size yielded greater efficiencies, it should be allowed.  We've seen that disproven time and again when resulting companies lose the qualities which originally made them special (like Boeing, who made the most reliable planes).  But restoring proper antitrust enforcement (in which the existing companies like Warner Bros Discover would already seem to be monopolies whose very size limited public choices--an inefficient outcome for consumers) would only be a small part of the de-financialization which needs to occur in the US economy.

Finance needs to be boring, and only then can everything else become exciting again.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros

AI is the digital asbestos we'll be digging out of our walls for decades

Cory Doctorow at his best, incredible, I couldn't have brought this all together in one essay said any better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Cory dismisses all the garbage claims and worries, and gets to the heart of it all.  AI is intended to cost middle class thinking and creative jobs, like computer coding, that's why so much is being invested in it.  The plan is to lay lots of those people off,  Then what about them?

Well, if AI delivered what it promised, this might well make consumers happy.  Why pay those people if AI does the job better?  But it won't.  It will make things go bad quickly.

Unlike earlier technologies which empowered people, creating centaurs like a human driving a car with the car doing the muscle work, AI creates reverse-centaurs, where humans are reduced to the function of monitoring the AI that does the "original" thinking.

The problem here is that people don't monitor things very well.  They are much better wired for actually doing things, including the original thinking.  Monitoring AI's thinking, when AI is designed to always choose the next most probable choice which always looks fine on the face of things, is an impossible task for people to do.  Especially the less experienced and less well paid people corporations plan to hire after the mass AI layoffs.  The basic problem is well known already and called automation blindness.

So we'll be left with shitty everything, delivered to us by corporate monopolies that offered us no choice, with mass unemployment and underemployment like never before.  And no easy way back.

Producers AND Consumers must unite to fight this monster.

Maybe after the bubble is popped, some of the developments and capabilities will be useful in limited ways, Cory details this too, but nothing like the investment going into them.  It won't be as simple as the WorldCom bust, which actually left useful fiber in the ground still being used.

I'd encourage people to never abandon real thinking and skills.  I myself continue writing blogs and computer programs the old fashioned way.

Cory also expounds on something relevant to this blog.  Cory says he writes parables and not forecasts.  That's what I do also.  It's like, if we keep doing business as usual, the climate in 2100 will be devastating.  But I don't know if we'll continue to do 'business as usual' by then.  I hope we don't, and at some point people accept the correct ideas, I'm hoping to create some here, and steer away from the greater disaster.  Then suppose 2100 arrives and disaster doesn't happen because of great social changes were made, similar to those I've suggested, to prevent it.  It would seem by then that my prognostications while wrong were useful.  And that is the point.  Not to foresee the future but to help guide it, by helping to illuminate the entire view.