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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.

I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.

I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!

The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

The Blair Witch Project is a special case because being low budget is inherently part of the story, which alleviates most of the problems caused by having to be low budget. This doesn't generalize.