This was interesting, because I guess I would have thought that the problem was that social media was cannibalizing the audience for theater comedies, and it seems like maybe the answer is more complicated.

I think the cracker barrel fiasco this week is really sort of an example of this endemic modernity that there are some fucked up incentives fucking everything up, and we have really poor language (It was wokeness!) to describe it. It really shows that there are sort of two definitions to capitalism. The colloquial definition that I think most people defend, anyone can make stuff and anyone can buy it and markets are an efficient way to connect buyers to sellers. If you make something people like you should get rich and if you don't you should fail and your company should die, and no matter how liberal and social justice-y I feel, I generally speaking support this pattern existing in society.

...and the more structured definition that involves the specific macroeconomic factors that impact the incentives people have. Like, there are people who want to make comedies and people who want to consume comedies, but the incentives aren't there for executives to green light them. The wall street / stock market dominates the consumer market. We're actually losing that colloquial definition of capitalism. And that creates a pretty fucked world.