Bravo Johnson on Farcaster

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The modern entertainment economy doesn’t reward personal satisfaction—it rewards scalable consensus. So if you truly enjoy something, but it can’t scale—you may have to evangelize it, or else it dies. That’s a pretty weird and unsettling inversion. I’m gonna call it zero-sum economics of cultural distribution: the idea that for certain mega-projects (like the MCU or AAA games) to be profitable, they must dominate to the exclusion of everything else.

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If you want that $200M Marvel movie to exist, it has to monopolize screens, attention, and distribution networks. It’s not enough for it to break even. It needs to crush. And so, for you to enjoy it, 50 other weird, subtle, personal, maybe even beautiful projects need to vanish. There’s no room. The bandwidth’s gone. The theater chain dropped the indie to run Guardians of the Galaxy 9 on six screens. The game store won’t stock the narrative-driven $15 game because Fortnite and EA already ate the oxygen. You can’t just “like both.” The ecosystem doesn’t work that way anymore. And that’s the quiet violence built into these entertainment economies: Your consumption requires the nonexistence of other people’s work.

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Is this true? Maybe the small beautiful personal projects just move on to other venues, funding sources, distribution channels. It’s cheaper than ever to make a feature length film, and easier than ever to deliver it direct to viewers. Niche curation is at ATH. I agree it’s hard for an indie project to break through to the mainstream. But I don’t see them directly competing with Marvel in the way you describe. Am I off the mark?

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Tools mean nothing when distribution is controlled by algorithmic black boxes optimized for engagement, not discovery. Advertising costs are the same on aggregate as they ever were before the “internet” And shooting on iPhone isn’t actually cheaper - equipment was never the main expense. It’s crew, locations, post-production, sound design, color correction, legal clearances. Gatekeeping has just migrated, not vanished. The real barriers to entry — money, audience access, and labor support — remain intact or worse. European and Asian film funds are doing the cultural investment America abandoned. We dismantled our domestic arts infrastructure, We exported the market magic logic, imported the subsidies.

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