Why is Media So Diseased?
Calvin & Hobbes to be feature length movie | Elsa doing 9/11 | Calibri font deemed too woke
I don’t want to do a tacky as hell 2025 roundup because what the hell do I know about 2025? Except that ‘slop’ is the word of the year, and ‘AI’ is the person of the year.
I’ve spent all of 2025 producing Computer Says Maybe, a podcast that discusses the politics and power of technology with intense unrelenting depth. Counterintuitively, producing a podcast like this one at a weekly cadence made it harder to understand what’s going on; there’s a very short amount of time to go deep on massive complex topics — anything from advanced chip manufacturing to accessible programming languages to the history of multi-level marketing — and my fiendish dyslexic mind hasn’t had the time to slow down and let the ideas settle in.
But through all this noise my colleagues and I managed to pick out our favourite conversations from the year and discuss them in this very fun episode, where I cry out, “give me something I can work with here” while lamenting over the sheer lack of imagination dribbling out of the vacant space you find behind the eyes of Silicon Valley Men.
And tbh maybe this is what 2025 was all about: the general public whirring around the ant farm, desperately trying to build a society that makes sense, while the men in charge destroy media, entertainment, and all forms of pleasure with their business savvy and crusty old prophecies about the future of superintelligence. Here are some stories to remind you how diseased ‘media’ has become.
Disney are throwing $1bn into OpenAI’s raging money furnace while accusing Google of piracy in the same breath. This licensing deal means that Disney can use OpenAI’s tools to generate well-known characters for whatever content they wish. This is such an ick. I guess all media will soon become like that coke advert everyone hates. I don’t feel like living in a world where ‘animated’ and ‘AI generated’ are basically interchangeable, but I’m also not saying that all AI generated content is inherently bad because that just isn’t true. Using it to have a laugh with your friends is one thing — using it to displace labour and to generate uncanny demented vignettes as multinational media conglomerate is another. There’s something about the quality of machine-made content that eludes media executives: it just doesn’t seem to matter if it looks unironically shit. As long as it saves money, I guess.
Speaking of money: Netflix and Paramount are battling to acquire Warner Bros. If they win, Chief AI Lobbyist Larry Ellison will likely secure his future as the patriarchal overlord of all media in the US, and Trump apologist Bari Weiss can continue to censor as much news as she likes. If Netflix win we may as well say goodbye to physical cinemas all together, strap in, and let the media apocalypse wash over us like a cheap coming of age series about teens falling in love.
In the age of AI — and the age of Nothing New Ever — ‘media’ is meaningless and it’s all about how much IP you own, steal, or rearrange into a bad movie. I recently read a depressing as shit interview with the Hollywood producer behind The Lego Movie, The Long Walk, and The Minecraft movie — ie a man who’s never had an original thought in his life and has never needed AI to make derivative slop. His lifelong wish is to get his hands on the IP for Calvin and Hobbes. He’s been writing to the creator for twenty years and has “gotten nowhere,” thank fuck. Sometimes that thing you loved as a child can just stay as a memory: you don’t have to ruin it by yanking it into the present and rendering it in 3D.
Moving from fiction into heavily redacted facts: the Epstein files. I’m sure like every other healthy person you’ve been spending the Christmas period snuggling up and scrolling through ALL of them (I haven’t, sorry). These drip-fed, politically-timed documents represent the beginning and end of reality: they contain nothing but raw truth but no one can make any sense of them; they are a spectacle beyond our reckoning and seem to yield confusion where all we want is justice. The Epstein files feel less like information and more like a scandalous artefact vulnerable to exploitation by agents of chaos. There are faked images of Epstein and Trump partying with young women or girls, supporting what the general public already know to be true, while also trivialising and delegitimising the the severity of his crimes. There’s even one of Epstein kissing Melania on the lips for some reason. Why the hell not, noise is noise.
It can be hard wading through all this cud if you’re someone trying to produce media in good faith. In October I went to Zeg, a storytelling festival, to learn more about how journalists and publishers are responding to these signals. People were mostly confused and frustrated. In one a panel, a journalist went on a tirade about digital media and begged and pleaded with the audience to read more physical books. Apparently if you inform and/or entertain yourself through digital means, you’re part of the problem. This is patently untrue, and telling everyone to read more books is like yelling at the Global North to recycle more, as if that will reverse climate change. But more importantly it’s ableist: I would LOVE to spend all day not looking at screens but unfortunately I need to use text-to-speech apps for anything longer than a ten minute read. And tbh this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a writer complain that no one is reading like they did in the olden days, and it’s never a good look. Printed publishing is brutal; digital publishing is brutal but in a different way — you can’t just complain and say one is better than the other! It’s all media and it’s all equally diseased.
For a more nuanced perspective, take a look at Spite House: AI, disintermediation and the end of the free web by content strategist Lauren Pope. This is someone who’s had to make engaging content even before the internet was a thing, then adapted to the new realities of the web, and now with the advent of AI finds herself at a crossroads: does she join or resist? It’s not fair to say that she has to ‘adapt’ to AI in the same way she did with the web, because generative AI is literally a threat to her livelihood. But either way the world is telling her she has to choose between becoming a grim AI shill or a spiteful old fashioned Luddite. I really appreciate this piece of work because she’s someone coming at this from a professional content making perspective, and she’s described how paralysing this false dichotomy is. She’s not blindly embracing the new world order, but she’s not rejecting it and opting to live in the woods either. Rather, she’s stuck in an unenjoyable purgatory — and I hope she and the rest of us can get out in 2026.
Some stuff I couldn’t find space for but wanted to mention anyway:
The American media elites can’t seem to stop bickering about Olivia Nuzzi. Vanity Fair published an excerpt of her memoir American Canto and as it turns out, she’s a bad writer. Dull men such as her ex are using this as an excuse to be misogynist, and have written multi-part paywalled blogposts about what a terrible woman she is. Columnist Ana Marie Cox published a ruthless edit of the memoir excerpt, because the writing genuinely is perplexingly bad and isn’t an excuse to be sexist. Vanity Fair will not be renewing her contract.
Calibri deemed to woke for diplomats, US secretary of state demands switch back to Times New Roman