The confluence of digital projection, streaming channels, AI, and the alleged death of criticism often makes it seem like we are dealing with the destruction of a worldview. I believe that this is indeed the goal of the corporations that control the studios and publishers. I don’t think it means that people don’t want to read criticism. What they don’t want to read are writers who are afraid of their editors, who curry favor with Hollywood, and who want to be influencers. Critics like that don’t consider one of the most important and necessary things about criticism today, that “struggle,” as Noam Chomsky put it, is always a matter of fighting “the business world.”

That should be foundational. The novelist Don DeLillo said the same thing in 2005, in an interview with a French horror-film magazine:

Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments…. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.