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Commercially, film probably shines in larger formats since digital basically only goes up to 645 format which is on the smaller end of medium format and those cameras cost upwards of 50k and most digital cameras use the same sensor technology compared to differences in film stocks. Otherwise it is more of a hobbyist/ artistic choice.

Because the vast majority of people aren't tech savvy enough to care about ads and tracking, ads and tracking everywhere is normalized.

This. The video game industry has grown by such huge amounts over the past 10-15 years that fans of old franchises are a small minority of the total demographic developers want and need to justify pumping the budgets they do into games now. Most of the new market consumers are fine with microtransactions, season passes, cosmetics, loot boxes and other types of monetization and gameplay that is way more profitable. If you sell a game d2 fans want, you are making serious monetization concessions to appeal to a tiny sliver of the overall userbase of the next diablo so it doesn't make sense.

When a game like Genshin Impact does 1 billion in revenue every 6 months it is only a matter of time before the rest of the market moves in that direction.

It is more nuanced than that. The issue is that a lot of western societies are falling into debt traps because of a lot of social and economic factors which are already straining these systems to the point that they cant keep up, and the conservative strategy (in my good faith interpretation) regarding this is reducing the cost of programs that they consider to be bloated. This can be interpreted as running it into the ground as the bloat is often in bureaucracy which can easily pass the buck to actual service providers which then suffer from lack of funding. In contrast a more liberal solution would likely involve increasing spending then trying to recover that through additional taxes, which conservatives would say doesn't solve the cost problem but rather exacerbates it since bloat remains and is paid for by more debt or taxes. Of course this is just a general simplification of the conflict.

Clearly the solution is probably somewhere in between, but political polarization has simply pushed people to their party lines and entrenched their positions such that no real progress can happen while things continue to fall apart.

I think it is a multivariable thing, especially when you are looking at different municipalities and their respective crime policies. A lot of the places that top the list have had rising homicide rates over the past decade from a low around 2010-2015, with the national rate reaching a local low in 2014 before climbing from there. To me it could suggest that populations were coping (poorly) for a while before the pandemic broke the camels back so to speak.

I would think that there are other environmental stressors that have influenced the behavior first, specifically the economic stagnation of the middle and working classes, combined with things like the opioid epidemic, income and housing insecurity with everything further exacerbated by the pandemic, social isolation, economic and supply chain constraints and now record inflation, all within the last decade and with minimal support systems available, along with the rise of divisive populist politics permeating everything and social media pushing people into echo chambers that radicalize their opinions even further.

A lot of people are probably beyond stressed and stretched way past their tolerance point by now.

A lot of art created now, especially for film/ media, already goes through a similar process that AI just automates and accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn compositions out through mashing references they gather on google images or asset stores, not to mention just straight photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts produced fairly derivative and homogenized since everything is just referencing what google images serves or assets that everyone else uses.

Even fine artists have likely had their practice influenced by the whims of what the algorithms on major social media outlets are willing to favor in order to get engagement. It kind of feels like many creatives have been incentivized into becoming slaves to these processes, which has in turn made them seem replaceable with AI.

That is true, though I feel like the issue has overlap in the emergence of public relations and the paradigm shift in advertising (from qualitative appeals to emotional appeals) over the 20th century. Basically it is a lot harder to accurately judge if someone can do something, but in modern politics that doesn't matter because emotional appeals are much more successful at capturing an audience. So the business ceo is just an archetype that appeals to an idea, and doesn't have much of a qualitative value outside of that. An example would be Carly Fiorina who ran in 2016 as the candidate with business acumen from her time as CEO with HP, when in reality her tenure at HP painted a different story.

I think some of it has to do with the idea that skills that reward "revolutionaries" are not analogous to skills needed to run the state after they assume control. Those that are able to consolidate power have an advantage in capturing power in a vacuum, but all that means is that they have the political skills to know how to consolidate power, it has no bearing on their ability to run the a nation. The guy who catches the golden goose is just good at catching geese, it doesn't say anything about his ability to care for it afterwards. An issue is that elections filter based on the ability of the former and not the later.

It is sort of similar in how many nation building projects of the west have failed in recent times, because the people put into positions of power, weren't in power before for a reason which is usually tied to their incompetence.

Big gaming companies learned quite a few years ago via various microtransaction practices that the market has expanded so rapidly that the gamers that complain about these things are a minority that can basically be ignored now since the vast majority of players basically only started playing after insidious monetization practices have been normalized so it doesn't feel wrong to them. Why cater to old users who would only spend 60$ on a game and complain when you can just cater to all the new users who love to spend money on microtransactions by making the geek equivalent to Madden or Fifa and print money?

Influencers are just the byproduct of social media platforms commoditizing interaction as means of driving growth and engagement, since just keeping up to date with your friends doesn't drive much engagement. Once you add metrics for engagement like likes, retweets or whatever, it is only natural that interactions become gamified once you put these incentive structures into how the system functions.

I have heard that same argument elsewhere too, it would also explain why it took a populist outsider like Trump to break through that system while someone like Bernie on the other side couldn't.

Since the financialization of the economy in the 70-80s, the economy has bifurcated between "productive" parts which ate well off debt and globalization, and the rest that has had to deal with the fallout of de-industrialization and shift towards a service economy with lower paying, lower skill jobs that are less secure overall.

Politicians have just kept digging us deeper into the hole because while it is not sustainable there is no turning back without major social upheaval and massive uncertainty.

Celsius got huge deposits based on unsustainable yield guarantees (17% I think), they took that crypto and used it as collateral on defi protocols, then took the loans they got and gave it to funds like 3ac, who made money on leveraged carry trades that eventually worked up to Luna which was offering an absurd 20% apy through anchor which was completely unsustainable but basically kept afloat by Luna itself dumping money into it.

Everyone could see they were running out of money which would eventually cause them to blow up, which caused people to eventually jump ship, which caused Luna to implode because it was fundamentally flawed but people were either too greedy or didn't do their due diligence to avoid it, which caused all of their assets to vaporize as they tried to defend their stablecoin peg. With 3ac insolvent, nobody that lent to them could get their capital back, which meant they could no longer repay their defi loans which caused them to be liquidated as prices dropped and they couldn't post additional collateral. With their funds locked or liquidated, they had nothing to return to depositors who wanted their stuff back.

To be charitable you could say they weren't outright scamming people, but anyone with a nose should have smelled the enormous stench of death coming from the entire thing.