RFS 9: Kill Hollywood
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected …
Context & Ripple Effects
This essay is the sharpest turn yet in a long-running argument about Hollywood's future: Slate was already asking what comes after the industry's prime back in Hollywood's New Year at the end of 2005, and by late 2007 commentators were laying out the case that TV studios would die outright. What changes here is posture — the argument moves from forecasting decline to advocating that the startup world actively hasten it.
The claim that Hollywood has peaked is framed as an argument in the essay rather than settled fact, but its characterization of studio leadership as mean and politically connected is the essay's own stated position. The story traveled fast: NYT's Bits blog and PandoDaily both picked it up the same day, with PandoDaily's headline pushing back that killing Hollywood means learning Hollywood's game.
First-order effects
- Y Combinator converts diffuse tech-versus-media grievance into a named campaign, putting itself — and by extension its founders and alumni — at the center of a conflict previously argued in op-eds and blog posts.
- Mainstream business press amplification via NYT's Bits forces the dispute out of the Valley echo chamber, where Hollywood's trade and political apparatus can no longer ignore it.
Second-order effects
- PandoDaily's counterpoint — that victory requires mastering Hollywood's political methods — pressures startups to invest in lobbying and Washington presence rather than relying on better products alone.
- Content-distribution startups become the proxy battlefield: any platform that moves audiences away from studio channels gets read as advancing this campaign, whether or not it wants the role.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — a peaked incumbent fighting decline through political connections rather than product — the decisive contests between media and technology shift from markets to regulators, making policy capability a core competency for both sides.
- The episode hardens a template in which prominent investors publish manifestos that set agendas for the wider startup ecosystem, blurring the line between venture capital and political advocacy.
The trend: Silicon Valley commentary is escalating from predicting Hollywood's decline to organizing against it, moving the media-technology conflict from products into politics.