Comment by spencerflem

> You're asking it as a moral question,

I'm asking questions about what I could only interpret as a moral proposition.

> I honestly care about the end result.

You're applying normative criteria to evaluate something, whether it is the initial action or the consequences that proceed from it.

But before we event get to normative evaluations, I'm trying to understand what the substantive difference in the two things you're comparing are. It's seems bizarre to consider something to be the cultural inheritance of humanity as a whole, and then complain about certain humans adapting it to cultural activities that you for some reason don't like.

> And the end result seems to be going in the same direction as movies, as the range gets narrower in terms of what's produced, and everything is a sequel, remix, reshuffle of previous work.

The vast majority of all creative work has always been a remix or reshuffle of previous work. When we were younger, and were being exposed to things for the first time, everything seemed novel and original.

Maybe the first time you saw The Lion King, it didn't occur to you that it's essentially a rework of Hamlet, or you never counted how many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation were based on recycled plots from Homer. But this has always been going on. Sure, it's a little bit more explicit today when you are dealing with big Hollywood productions, since Hollywood has built up a large library of its own output to remix and reshuffle, and people do want to see new iterations of the specific things they grew up with.

Still, amidst all that, there's a lot of novel independent creative work being produced. By definition, though, that's all going to be found in niches and not in the mass market -- but it's always been that way.

We've also had a massive shift in the specific media people use to express creativity, thanks to the internet. Lots of small-scale independent work just gets self-published on YouTube these days, and doesn't filter through the mass-market studios and publishers anymore. Consider that the increased ability for independent creators to work outside the legacy media has the effect of also limiting the amount of novel work that the legacy media have access to.

> There are exceptions, but their percentage is far lower than in previous decades.

And vastly higher than in previous previous decades. Compare modern movies to the stuff that Hollywood was putting out during the era of the Hays code. After the collapse of those restrictions, there was an outpouring of pent-up creativity that lasted a few decades. Maybe modern movies aren't as distinct or creative as the ones from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but try comparing them to the average film from the '40s, '50s, or '60s.