I mean, all the shows you mentioned have been accused of being AI-written or AI-assisted. They just had that big Hollywood strike about it and all that did was make the studios double down on it. AI in particular cannot keep multiple ideas going. Like a dream, it's all of one thing or all another and never both.
It's really hard to find a good modern book to read, too. Amazon is such a steaming slush pile that it's impossible to find anything written with anything approaching competence. I was reading a book from an author I usually enjoy, only to find that in this book, she had phoned it in. Ugh, it was a flat, predictable plot with flat, predictable characters. But I KNOW this author can do better because I've read it.
Which is how I came to be here, preferring to read authors here or older writers from yesteryear, very good point here! Phoning it in has indeed become a major problem in a great deal of literature to-day.
I've been noticing this lack of quality story telling myself, and that its not solely endemic to the WOKE crowd, either, unfortunately. I have often of late downloaded the sample chapters of books on Amazon, both indie published or press published, wanting a good story written by something without an agenda, or to support an indie author that I knew was not WOKE. But I rarely can make it through the first chapter. The stories are stilted, boring, the dialogue unbelievable, the plot filled with holes right in the first chapter, and either way too much description or way too little of it.
One particular book I can think of I truly, truly wanted to like because the author is a conservative "based" writer and colleague of my husband on Discord. I forced myself through the book, hoping it would get better, but that hope was in vain. It was filled with way too much description - every character was introduced with at least a paragraph of description, every new building, room, and scene with over a page of it. And worse yet, the story was terribly weak under all that description and dialogue. Characters going to places that had no bearing on the story, reader expectations never realized, getting to the end and seeing that the whole journey that the hero was put through was really pointless with no explanation.
And as I look at other books on Amazon, both of authors in the indie communities I attend or even just searching for new books to read, book after book after book has the same problems.
I actually hardly read much at all anymore because of it, and that's a shame! I've gone back and re-read Tolkien, Louis L'Amour and other writers of the past to see if perhaps I was just being nostalgic and overly critical, but the truth is, modern writers are not even close to being in league with even the pulp dime novel writers of the past.
I do wonder why new authors can't seem to write engaging, well crafted stories anymore. So much fiction today reads like fan fiction, but perhaps that is the key to the problem. The great authors of the past did not have TV to go by; they read. todays authors are heavily influenced by TV and movies and short fiction. Many do start out writing fan fiction, trying to match their favorite TV shows or movies, and this carries over to their handling of longer fiction too.
Maybe, anyway. I still try, however, to find a story written well enough that I can get through it even if its written on a fan fiction level. I can enjoy fan fiction well enough; its just that when I pay good money for a book, I want something more than just fan fiction, you know?
This is so true. And unfortunately, many conservatives are quick to embrace low-quality fiction just because they are so desperate for something that isn't woke (understandable, of course). I do think there's something to the theory of film convention being over-applied to all forms of story, and perhaps I'll talk more about that in the future. It's definitely something I've observed and even felt seeping insidiously into my own writing, especially during high school. And of course, eroding attention spans are certainly responsible for some of this degradation as well.
Cause for the incompetent story telling? Easy: DEI hires in place of real writers. They brought people to replace storytellers, people who were chosen not for skill with story but for the political-reliability credentials. When their skill set is virtue signalling, that's what you get from them. When their skill set is storytelling, story is what you get. This is not a rocket-sciencey nut to crack.
They have an agenda. Entertaining you is not on it.
It is their philosophy of 'kill the past' taken to its logical conclusion as art relies on the past more than anything else, especially historic and fantasy epics.
Post-modernist thought taken to its utter end, absolutely. Three generations now have sought to eradicate what came before in order to build something "new", and we know stand on the rubble field of nothing because they destroyed the building blocks and foundations of art in the process. The Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground and much that has been lost will not be recovered. It remains to be seen what can be salvaged and when the next renaissance will occur. Hopefully, it won't another 1,200 years.
It's already begun. I am very very very encouraged by young people especially here is the south of the USA who are striving for meaning. They have to turn somewhere and postmodernism gives them nothing because it is all about nothing. There is faith and there is tradition. Both of these are profound wells of inspiration and it is up to older people like me, in large numbers, to put those ideas out into the world again as best we can.
AI and/or writing by committee are probably huge parts of it. But your latter point, about not bothering to learn the craft, is likely the real culprit. My thoughts are that it’s writers who haven’t done the reps being promoted because they are either nepo-hires or they tick the right demographic boxes. That’s just a hypothesis, but probably a correct one.
I agree. Hollywood (and even trad publishing to a certain extent) is such an in-crowd. They promote their friends, and if not their friends, then at least those who espouse the "correct" worldview. It most definitely is not a meritocracy.
That could be, but then wouldn't we be seeing a flourishing of indie writers in books and movies? It's never been easier to publish your own book than it is now. I've seen indie movies for free on youtube that match the production value of nearly anything in the theater, let alone "straight to streaming". And yet, as you said, the very CRAFT seems to have been lost. I honestly don't know the answer but you're definitely not the only one noticing it.
I agree. Its been shown time and again but especially during the strike, that Hollywood, just like corporations right now, is saturated by DEI initiatives and hires, where positions all up and down the ladder have been filled with people who check demographic check boxes and not shown any ability to write. You see it all over the publishing industry, from the small independents to the big 4 - LGBT alphabet people, people of "color" (though white, apparently, is no longer considered a color), women (though how do they define what is and isn't a woman?) are all pushed to the head of the line from books to comics to journals and magazines all because of how they identify, not because they have skill.
We have some hope, however - signs are showing that the last 5 years of experimentation is turning out rotten fruit and the cooperate adoption of identity politics is slowing as the money funding it dries up. The same is going on in Hollywood if the rumors are to be believed. The downside is that it will take several years to purge the pipelines.
So many writers think they can be great writers without being great readers. Plot twist: you can't. This is one of the reasons I think that even historically there have been very few great novels written by people under the age of 30. It takes time to read enough to really have absorbed good stories to your core, cultivate good taste, and have enough interesting life experiences to have something to say.
This is even worse these days because people don't read anymore, and the plots of the TV sludge that is consumed instead just isn't a good substitute. Even Game of Thrones which is supposedly "super-complex TV" has been dumbed down and simplified so much compared to the books. Having good taste is also "elitist" so people don't do that either any more, and smartphones+careerism in novel writing have made it pretty hard for authors to have as many genuine experiences as before.
So what can we do as writers/readers? Well reading more is a good start, but also being unabashedly critical of our reading choices and those of our friends. 1 and 2 star reviews on Amazon. I don't care if it kills your sales: if your book is shit you need to write something better. Calling our friends out for reading softcore porn like Fourth Wing, or worse, watching The Office (for the fourth time!). Writing in-depth reviews helps with this, in both developing our own taste, and helping others understand what is wrong with the trash that they enjoy.
I also think that it might be better for us as writers to publish less. I wrote a book in college for my creative writing major, but I'm not planning on writing another one until I feel like I have something more valuable to say. This doesn't mean don't write, but don't add to the slush pile unless you have something to say. It's not enough for it to be not-woke, or have good world building, or whatever. The plot and characters have to be good. And frankly that's hard and takes loads of reading and living, which I'm not seeing that many wanna-be writers doing.
Wanted to echo your comment about Pirates of the Caribbean. I loved that film when it came out; I’ve recently shown it to my children and they love it too. It has a timeless quality similar to The Princess Bride or The Wizard of Oz.
The heart of storytelling is the ability to sustain tension. The best way to sustain tension for the length of a novel is to create a moral quandary. Physical obstacles have clear solutions. If they are solved, the tension falls. If they are ignored, the tension falls. Moral quandaries can be sustained because of the inherent unwillingness the resolve them, which must come at some moral cost.
The most potent moral quandary on which to build a story is a universal value vs. a personal value. But to do this, one must propose to the audience a universal value. And we live in a post-modernist age in which it is difficult to propose a universal value to any audience, let alone a broad one.
And this post-modernism infects the storytelling of left and right alike. Both, for instance, ascribe to the post-modern tropes of the invisible narrator and close POV storytelling. These are expressions of post-modernism because they deny the possibility of an objective view and allow only individual experience to be expressed. And if only individual experience exists, then there is no space for universal value, and thus no contest between personal and universal value with which to sustain tension in a story.
Thus, even in a good-vs-evil hero story, only the technical problem of how to fight the bad guy's super weapon can drive the story. We cannot ask why good is good or evil is evil and why we should lay down our personal goods of heath and safety for some higher-order good that requires us to suffer, fight, and die. And if we cannot ask that question, we cannot have a good story.
Well said and to the heart, I think! And this plays into another trend that I have come to loathe - the antihero and now the glorification of the villain. We can no longer tell the difference between hero or villain - heroes act terribly and for selfish motivations and all villains are given a sob story that is meant to make us sympathize with them. I find very few characters that I truly care about anymore, and ones that I did in the past are subverted and destroyed or mocked and turned into jokes.
If there is no absolute value, how do you tell the hero from the villain? The Villain becomes the epitomy of heroic selfishness, and the hero is a chump.
I think you may very well have nailed it with this comment. I've been scratching around the edges of this for some time and I don't think I've ever heard it explained quite as well as you do here.
Hear! Hear! I see it as pandering to the lowest common denominator for generations raised on television. No one seems to know how to have an active and fertile imagination anymore
overwhelmingly this problem exists from the left perspectives but happens widely on the political stance spectrum. It’s like film, and broadly, Art as a whole are being weaponized to a fault now. They are abusing and manipulating artistic ventures to yell at each other with poor casting, story telling sabotage, lack of authenticity for the sake of a political message. It’s also starting to bleed into other art forms, video games, books, etc. it’s effectively ruining a generation of truly great stories that have been flattened by vitriolic people. Additionally, within the fiction or at-least historically based fiction. They love to take pieces of known history and mix it up with their horrible bad and lackluster understanding of the period pieces and romanticize it so it fits their little world views. I miss when films were simply reflective of real historically accurate reflections with stories that could have easily occurred of that time. A film such as Gladiator. It’s not that everyone wants everything to be aligned with their view but at least be honest about the manipulation and lack of knowledge behind making a film and mucking up a absolutely boring, uninteresting, poorly casted, poorly written, lazy production. AI is less the problem than people think. It’s like the dawn of CGI where everyone was thinking it would just purely be a downfall of film. Lord of The Rings Trilogy used CGI to create and ENHANCE the masterpieces, not rely on and use it as a crutch. It’s all in how they use the tools at hand. An affective use of AI would probably not be noticed because it will have been reviewed and adjusted as necessary to shape into what a creator needed it to be.
The best storytellers are generally voracious readers. I’m not discounting oral storytelling traditions, some of humanity’s greatest stories were originally passed down orally after all. People just don’t read much anymore especially not classic stories, because they may contain something “triggering”, so they just aren’t exposed to the traditions of storytelling. You can’t tell a story well if you’ve never been told one well.
I think people still in modern times underestimate in a massive way, the lack of literacy in global public life. People literally cannot read nor would they, could they, sit still long enough to do so if they wanted to.
My biggest pet peeve is how corporate demands everything to be a universe and refuse to let a story have a beginning and a finish. Everything have to have prequels, sequels, spin off and multi universes now. Of course, is going to turn into a mess when the inevitable contradictions arise.
You bring up valid points. I think part of the issue is that we are being bombarded daily with mainstream media that it becomes hard for creatives to detached themselves and create something new and original like the authors from the past used to
It boils down to (as you note) a lack of appreciation for good fiction. One can't put out if one hasn't taken in, and the fiction writers of the day aren't reading the classics (or even the pulps) of the past, at least with any depth, and so they make drivel that even the comic book writers of the past would have laughed at
I have my own theory about the failures of hollywood and similar systems. What's occurred has been due to an abundance of nepotism. You can see that the elder directors and actors are still up there despite some being in their eighties and nineties. It's because there's no one to replace them. Once a particular tribe of individuals composes a significant fraction of producers and hiring managers, nepotism takes over. By hiring their own on the basis of ethnicity... or hiring individuals on the basis of diversity, they completely lose the ability to construct new IP. Hyper-creative people don't do well when boxed in by highly orthodox producers. The result is a collective creative bankruptcy in the next generation. Being unable to produce their own IP, they instead try to make sequels to existing great works.
The culture is collapsing as the purveyors of it were hired for reasons of ethnicity and not talent. Hollywood is broken and something alternative is going to replace it whether they want it to or not. We're in a position to build the next culture and kill the old one. Let's make the next culture a good one. Good luck!
It is because competent people have not bothered to excoriate hacks. Instead, they should be pilloried. Figuratively, of course. But publicly, their works must be taken apart, as this author has just done.
I mean, all the shows you mentioned have been accused of being AI-written or AI-assisted. They just had that big Hollywood strike about it and all that did was make the studios double down on it. AI in particular cannot keep multiple ideas going. Like a dream, it's all of one thing or all another and never both.
It's really hard to find a good modern book to read, too. Amazon is such a steaming slush pile that it's impossible to find anything written with anything approaching competence. I was reading a book from an author I usually enjoy, only to find that in this book, she had phoned it in. Ugh, it was a flat, predictable plot with flat, predictable characters. But I KNOW this author can do better because I've read it.
Which is how I came to be here, preferring to read authors here or older writers from yesteryear, very good point here! Phoning it in has indeed become a major problem in a great deal of literature to-day.
When writers had no internet and they drew their inspiration from real surroundings and people, the results were obviously to a higher standard
I've been noticing this lack of quality story telling myself, and that its not solely endemic to the WOKE crowd, either, unfortunately. I have often of late downloaded the sample chapters of books on Amazon, both indie published or press published, wanting a good story written by something without an agenda, or to support an indie author that I knew was not WOKE. But I rarely can make it through the first chapter. The stories are stilted, boring, the dialogue unbelievable, the plot filled with holes right in the first chapter, and either way too much description or way too little of it.
One particular book I can think of I truly, truly wanted to like because the author is a conservative "based" writer and colleague of my husband on Discord. I forced myself through the book, hoping it would get better, but that hope was in vain. It was filled with way too much description - every character was introduced with at least a paragraph of description, every new building, room, and scene with over a page of it. And worse yet, the story was terribly weak under all that description and dialogue. Characters going to places that had no bearing on the story, reader expectations never realized, getting to the end and seeing that the whole journey that the hero was put through was really pointless with no explanation.
And as I look at other books on Amazon, both of authors in the indie communities I attend or even just searching for new books to read, book after book after book has the same problems.
I actually hardly read much at all anymore because of it, and that's a shame! I've gone back and re-read Tolkien, Louis L'Amour and other writers of the past to see if perhaps I was just being nostalgic and overly critical, but the truth is, modern writers are not even close to being in league with even the pulp dime novel writers of the past.
I do wonder why new authors can't seem to write engaging, well crafted stories anymore. So much fiction today reads like fan fiction, but perhaps that is the key to the problem. The great authors of the past did not have TV to go by; they read. todays authors are heavily influenced by TV and movies and short fiction. Many do start out writing fan fiction, trying to match their favorite TV shows or movies, and this carries over to their handling of longer fiction too.
Maybe, anyway. I still try, however, to find a story written well enough that I can get through it even if its written on a fan fiction level. I can enjoy fan fiction well enough; its just that when I pay good money for a book, I want something more than just fan fiction, you know?
This is so true. And unfortunately, many conservatives are quick to embrace low-quality fiction just because they are so desperate for something that isn't woke (understandable, of course). I do think there's something to the theory of film convention being over-applied to all forms of story, and perhaps I'll talk more about that in the future. It's definitely something I've observed and even felt seeping insidiously into my own writing, especially during high school. And of course, eroding attention spans are certainly responsible for some of this degradation as well.
Cause for the incompetent story telling? Easy: DEI hires in place of real writers. They brought people to replace storytellers, people who were chosen not for skill with story but for the political-reliability credentials. When their skill set is virtue signalling, that's what you get from them. When their skill set is storytelling, story is what you get. This is not a rocket-sciencey nut to crack.
They have an agenda. Entertaining you is not on it.
It is their philosophy of 'kill the past' taken to its logical conclusion as art relies on the past more than anything else, especially historic and fantasy epics.
Post-modernist thought taken to its utter end, absolutely. Three generations now have sought to eradicate what came before in order to build something "new", and we know stand on the rubble field of nothing because they destroyed the building blocks and foundations of art in the process. The Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground and much that has been lost will not be recovered. It remains to be seen what can be salvaged and when the next renaissance will occur. Hopefully, it won't another 1,200 years.
It's already begun. I am very very very encouraged by young people especially here is the south of the USA who are striving for meaning. They have to turn somewhere and postmodernism gives them nothing because it is all about nothing. There is faith and there is tradition. Both of these are profound wells of inspiration and it is up to older people like me, in large numbers, to put those ideas out into the world again as best we can.
Agreed
AI and/or writing by committee are probably huge parts of it. But your latter point, about not bothering to learn the craft, is likely the real culprit. My thoughts are that it’s writers who haven’t done the reps being promoted because they are either nepo-hires or they tick the right demographic boxes. That’s just a hypothesis, but probably a correct one.
I agree. Hollywood (and even trad publishing to a certain extent) is such an in-crowd. They promote their friends, and if not their friends, then at least those who espouse the "correct" worldview. It most definitely is not a meritocracy.
Very much an in-crowd. It's a highly tribal mentality that you see in a number of powerful industries.
That could be, but then wouldn't we be seeing a flourishing of indie writers in books and movies? It's never been easier to publish your own book than it is now. I've seen indie movies for free on youtube that match the production value of nearly anything in the theater, let alone "straight to streaming". And yet, as you said, the very CRAFT seems to have been lost. I honestly don't know the answer but you're definitely not the only one noticing it.
I agree. Its been shown time and again but especially during the strike, that Hollywood, just like corporations right now, is saturated by DEI initiatives and hires, where positions all up and down the ladder have been filled with people who check demographic check boxes and not shown any ability to write. You see it all over the publishing industry, from the small independents to the big 4 - LGBT alphabet people, people of "color" (though white, apparently, is no longer considered a color), women (though how do they define what is and isn't a woman?) are all pushed to the head of the line from books to comics to journals and magazines all because of how they identify, not because they have skill.
We have some hope, however - signs are showing that the last 5 years of experimentation is turning out rotten fruit and the cooperate adoption of identity politics is slowing as the money funding it dries up. The same is going on in Hollywood if the rumors are to be believed. The downside is that it will take several years to purge the pipelines.
So many writers think they can be great writers without being great readers. Plot twist: you can't. This is one of the reasons I think that even historically there have been very few great novels written by people under the age of 30. It takes time to read enough to really have absorbed good stories to your core, cultivate good taste, and have enough interesting life experiences to have something to say.
This is even worse these days because people don't read anymore, and the plots of the TV sludge that is consumed instead just isn't a good substitute. Even Game of Thrones which is supposedly "super-complex TV" has been dumbed down and simplified so much compared to the books. Having good taste is also "elitist" so people don't do that either any more, and smartphones+careerism in novel writing have made it pretty hard for authors to have as many genuine experiences as before.
So what can we do as writers/readers? Well reading more is a good start, but also being unabashedly critical of our reading choices and those of our friends. 1 and 2 star reviews on Amazon. I don't care if it kills your sales: if your book is shit you need to write something better. Calling our friends out for reading softcore porn like Fourth Wing, or worse, watching The Office (for the fourth time!). Writing in-depth reviews helps with this, in both developing our own taste, and helping others understand what is wrong with the trash that they enjoy.
I also think that it might be better for us as writers to publish less. I wrote a book in college for my creative writing major, but I'm not planning on writing another one until I feel like I have something more valuable to say. This doesn't mean don't write, but don't add to the slush pile unless you have something to say. It's not enough for it to be not-woke, or have good world building, or whatever. The plot and characters have to be good. And frankly that's hard and takes loads of reading and living, which I'm not seeing that many wanna-be writers doing.
Wanted to echo your comment about Pirates of the Caribbean. I loved that film when it came out; I’ve recently shown it to my children and they love it too. It has a timeless quality similar to The Princess Bride or The Wizard of Oz.
Such a shame that they never made any sequels 😉
We just watched it again last night. Such a great film!
The heart of storytelling is the ability to sustain tension. The best way to sustain tension for the length of a novel is to create a moral quandary. Physical obstacles have clear solutions. If they are solved, the tension falls. If they are ignored, the tension falls. Moral quandaries can be sustained because of the inherent unwillingness the resolve them, which must come at some moral cost.
The most potent moral quandary on which to build a story is a universal value vs. a personal value. But to do this, one must propose to the audience a universal value. And we live in a post-modernist age in which it is difficult to propose a universal value to any audience, let alone a broad one.
And this post-modernism infects the storytelling of left and right alike. Both, for instance, ascribe to the post-modern tropes of the invisible narrator and close POV storytelling. These are expressions of post-modernism because they deny the possibility of an objective view and allow only individual experience to be expressed. And if only individual experience exists, then there is no space for universal value, and thus no contest between personal and universal value with which to sustain tension in a story.
Thus, even in a good-vs-evil hero story, only the technical problem of how to fight the bad guy's super weapon can drive the story. We cannot ask why good is good or evil is evil and why we should lay down our personal goods of heath and safety for some higher-order good that requires us to suffer, fight, and die. And if we cannot ask that question, we cannot have a good story.
Well said and to the heart, I think! And this plays into another trend that I have come to loathe - the antihero and now the glorification of the villain. We can no longer tell the difference between hero or villain - heroes act terribly and for selfish motivations and all villains are given a sob story that is meant to make us sympathize with them. I find very few characters that I truly care about anymore, and ones that I did in the past are subverted and destroyed or mocked and turned into jokes.
If there is no absolute value, how do you tell the hero from the villain? The Villain becomes the epitomy of heroic selfishness, and the hero is a chump.
Great comment. I'd never heard about what makes a story good that makes sense like this. Do you have any books or resources that explain this further?
I'm actually working on an essay on this for my Substack.
Awesome!
I think you may very well have nailed it with this comment. I've been scratching around the edges of this for some time and I don't think I've ever heard it explained quite as well as you do here.
Wow so interesting! Great comment
Hear! Hear! I see it as pandering to the lowest common denominator for generations raised on television. No one seems to know how to have an active and fertile imagination anymore
NAILED IT.
overwhelmingly this problem exists from the left perspectives but happens widely on the political stance spectrum. It’s like film, and broadly, Art as a whole are being weaponized to a fault now. They are abusing and manipulating artistic ventures to yell at each other with poor casting, story telling sabotage, lack of authenticity for the sake of a political message. It’s also starting to bleed into other art forms, video games, books, etc. it’s effectively ruining a generation of truly great stories that have been flattened by vitriolic people. Additionally, within the fiction or at-least historically based fiction. They love to take pieces of known history and mix it up with their horrible bad and lackluster understanding of the period pieces and romanticize it so it fits their little world views. I miss when films were simply reflective of real historically accurate reflections with stories that could have easily occurred of that time. A film such as Gladiator. It’s not that everyone wants everything to be aligned with their view but at least be honest about the manipulation and lack of knowledge behind making a film and mucking up a absolutely boring, uninteresting, poorly casted, poorly written, lazy production. AI is less the problem than people think. It’s like the dawn of CGI where everyone was thinking it would just purely be a downfall of film. Lord of The Rings Trilogy used CGI to create and ENHANCE the masterpieces, not rely on and use it as a crutch. It’s all in how they use the tools at hand. An affective use of AI would probably not be noticed because it will have been reviewed and adjusted as necessary to shape into what a creator needed it to be.
You are spot on with Curse of the Black Pearl, awesome you included it. Great piece!
The best storytellers are generally voracious readers. I’m not discounting oral storytelling traditions, some of humanity’s greatest stories were originally passed down orally after all. People just don’t read much anymore especially not classic stories, because they may contain something “triggering”, so they just aren’t exposed to the traditions of storytelling. You can’t tell a story well if you’ve never been told one well.
I think people still in modern times underestimate in a massive way, the lack of literacy in global public life. People literally cannot read nor would they, could they, sit still long enough to do so if they wanted to.
My biggest pet peeve is how corporate demands everything to be a universe and refuse to let a story have a beginning and a finish. Everything have to have prequels, sequels, spin off and multi universes now. Of course, is going to turn into a mess when the inevitable contradictions arise.
Good point. Everything is intended to be a cash cow milked for as long as possible.
You bring up valid points. I think part of the issue is that we are being bombarded daily with mainstream media that it becomes hard for creatives to detached themselves and create something new and original like the authors from the past used to
It boils down to (as you note) a lack of appreciation for good fiction. One can't put out if one hasn't taken in, and the fiction writers of the day aren't reading the classics (or even the pulps) of the past, at least with any depth, and so they make drivel that even the comic book writers of the past would have laughed at
I have my own theory about the failures of hollywood and similar systems. What's occurred has been due to an abundance of nepotism. You can see that the elder directors and actors are still up there despite some being in their eighties and nineties. It's because there's no one to replace them. Once a particular tribe of individuals composes a significant fraction of producers and hiring managers, nepotism takes over. By hiring their own on the basis of ethnicity... or hiring individuals on the basis of diversity, they completely lose the ability to construct new IP. Hyper-creative people don't do well when boxed in by highly orthodox producers. The result is a collective creative bankruptcy in the next generation. Being unable to produce their own IP, they instead try to make sequels to existing great works.
The culture is collapsing as the purveyors of it were hired for reasons of ethnicity and not talent. Hollywood is broken and something alternative is going to replace it whether they want it to or not. We're in a position to build the next culture and kill the old one. Let's make the next culture a good one. Good luck!
It is because competent people have not bothered to excoriate hacks. Instead, they should be pilloried. Figuratively, of course. But publicly, their works must be taken apart, as this author has just done.