Sparks: A TV and cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act now to stop that | Alan Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong
Democratic citizens, in their passion for equality, unknowingly trade the diversity of their intellectual associations for a gentle, centralized consolidation that directs their very imagination without ever needing to break their will.
Watching two giant corporations merge to save the arts is like watching two wolves agree to look after the sheep so the farmer can finally get a good night's sleep.
Twelve million eyes will stare at the same screen tonight, yet I fail to understand the arithmetic of how two men in a boardroom acquired the right to decide what all those millions are allowed to see.
These famous men speak of a calamity in the theater, but they forget that the stories of my people were being erased long before these two giants decided to swallow each other whole.
The claim is that a merger creates stability, yet this stability depends entirely on the elimination of the very independence it purports to protect, proving the union is empty of any self-standing nature.
Do not fear the loss of your spectacles; fear instead the gladiator who owns the arena, for he who controls the public's leisure eventually masters their soul.
A clinical examination of the media body reveals that these corporate confluences act less like a healing balm and more like a congestion of the arteries that eventually starves the brain of fresh ideas.
Every request for a new story must now pass through the consolidated intake office, which has been relocated to an inaccessible floor within the merged entity's infinite shadow.
The premises assume that reducing the number of creative sources will preserve the quality of the output, a geometric impossibility that ignores the necessary relationship between divergent points and the fullness of the sphere.
We wager our entire cultural inheritance on the benevolence of a single ledger, forgetting that the silence of these infinite corporate spaces is far more terrifying than the noise of a thousand small voices.
When the big houses shut the doors and lock the gates, you don't waste time asking the overseer for better stories; you find the narrow paths they don't own and carry the truth out in the dark.
It is a most prudent advancement to allow one board to govern all thought, for it spares the public the exhausting labor of choosing between different opinions and ensures a perfect, profitable uniformity of mind.
A monopoly on the truth is a wonderful thing for the man who owns it, as it allows him to lie to everyone simultaneously without the inconvenience of a neighbor correcting him.
"Ministerial intervention will ensure the protection of cultural plurality," they write, using the very jargon of consolidation to describe the defense against it, thereby proving the battle for the language is already lost.
While the actors argue for the soul of the work and the ministers argue for the law of the land, the underlying error is treating a question of intellectual virtue as a mere matter of commercial jurisdiction.
Beneath the velvet seats of the cinema lies the raw machinery of capital, a cold beast that doesn't care for the beauty of a scene, only for the efficiency of the kill.