A lot is made of the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the Roman empire. A cultural touchstone that stood for hundreds of years was unseated, after all. But a closer study of what happened in the aftermath of the sack of Rome and the waning influence of its empire reveals the true horror. Monks in Christain enclaves had copied and stockpiled the most important cultural works. Scientific innovation skyrocketed as isolated regions began jockeying for position once again, rather than pretending to play nice so the Legions would leave them alone. And as for Italy itself? Truly tragic! It remained the center of wealth and culture for centuries to come, with Venice, Florence and Rome itself commanding huge amounts of trade and pilgrimages. 

The dominance of Italy only began to wane, ironically enough, because of an Italian man hired by the Portuguese. And he had to discover an entire unknown continent to trigger the shift. 

American media today is very much run like an empire. Where there used to be a great deal of small, local media companies running radio stations, newspapers and television, now a handful of major media conglomerates basically control everything.  

There are only five publishing houses for books, six if you count Amazon as the independent publisher. About four studios remain to make movies. Sony owns a large majority of music and music studios in the nation. TV was very stagnant under the three or four networks on the airwaves until cable came along and broke up the types of programming available but now almost all cable channels are as centralized as the three major networks were in the 50s and 60s. Even streaming boils down to Netflix and Disney, and one of those companies is also one of the only existing movie studios. 

And if you go up the ladder a few steps, many of these various branches of media are ultimately owned and run by even larger media conglomerates. 

The Internet has offered some freedom in media, but as it opened the door to new creators the old guard got very jealous and started pushing the businesses that managed Internet communication and commerce to join them as gatekeepers. So far, old media has largely succeeded in transforming places like Amazon and Facebook into extensions of their gatekeeping agenda, ensuring that the growing conglomerates of media hegemony will continue to corner the market. 

The direct result of this is stagnant media. Comic books keep pasting a new set of faces on top of the same trite, boring, cookie cutter plots. Disney spends more and more of its time remaking old films rather than telling new stories, to mixed or poor receptions (plus some occasional mockery, as with Mulan (2020)). Neither network or cable television has launched a truly significant TV show in the last decade. (Well, almost. A quick check reveals that, as of this posting, Game of Thrones is not quite a decade old yet.) 

The thing about empires is they grow stagnant very quickly. The various imperial dynasties of Asia severely slowed growth and progress in the region, in spite of their fairly widespread access to the technology and innovations of Europe and the Middle East. It’s certainly reassuring to see a large, imposing cultural edifice but the problem with edifices is they tend to stay the same until they crumble. And our media landscape is crumbling before our eyes. 

Five years ago everyone agreed that Netflix and Hulu were all you were going to need to keep up with TV and movies. It was just a matter of time until everyone agreed to share their stuff with one of the two service and we’d be living in a media golden age. Then the Netflix Original jokes started. 

Sure, some Netflix shows were good. Great, even. But a lot of it was mindless, repetitive drivel going over the same tired cultural and political points in new packaging with new faces. Movies started on a fast downward slide about the same time. Where the early 2010s were full of great movies like Kingsmen: The Secret Service, Edge of Tomorrow, and John Wick, few films of comparable appeal have landed since then. Even the Kingsmen and John Wick sequels have felt like noticeable steps down, or even outright failures when compared to their originals. Imperial media is failing. 

Now that may seem odd, given how powerful companies like Time-Warner and Disney appear. And as I noted before, when empires fall the remains tend to be quite powerful and influential for a long time to come so it isn’t like we’re looking at a total reinvention of the media landscape in the next five years or something. But shifts are coming and the stagnant nature of the modern establishment is a major part of why we’re seeing them. The other two elements come from the dissent in the ranks and the barbarians at the gates. 

Roman generals were always one of the biggest threats to the stability of the Republic, and later the Empire. They could gain too much popularity and too much influence for Rome to control, eventually getting aspirations of their own. By the same token outside forces, though not as disciplined, well equipped or numerous as the Roman Legions, could still take advantage of the size and fractured nature of Rome to do significant damage to Roman territory. These challenges are mirrored in modern media in the form of Gina Carano and The Daily Wire. 

As I noted last week, The Daily Wire has released an entertaining, though imperfect, independent action film by the name of Run, Hide, Fight which has received good reviews from audiences and promises further entertaining work to come. Meanwhile Gina Carano grew quite popular in her role as Cara Dune in Disney+’s The Mandalorian only to run afoul of a Twitter mob and get fired. Now, Gina is working with The Daily Wire to produce and star in a new, as of yet unannounced film. This is a major crack in the wall of the imperial media. 

So what can we expect? Well, actually… not a whole lot, not at first. Carano’s next film will take a while to get made; we probably won’t see it for another year at a minimum. These things take time, after all, even if they find a script that works and start production in a week there’s still a lot to do. But more than that, a handful of films won’t drastically alter the media landscape. 

However, there is a shift underway. People rarely notice the fall of empires unless they’re in the capitol as it burns. They just change the faces on the coins and continue working on the foundations already in place, with a little less oversight and little more freedom to experiment. My hope is that, as rogue agents like Carano break away from the existing media monoliths and join with new, vital media groups like The Daily Wire, we’ll see a sea change that drags talent away from the mainstream into smaller, more agile and experimental media. I doubt the organizations that currently make up the imperial media will vanish, but hopefully they will join with the culture change in due time. 

In the meantime, for solo creators like myself, there’s only one thing to do. Keep creating, little by little, for a better world, one story at a time.