The Lord of the Streams

It looks like Netflix won the war.

The Warner board rejected Paramount’s $108 billion acquisition offer, opting instead for the streaming giant’s bid, citing “higher value” and “lower risk to shareholders.” Translation: the spreadsheet spoke, and the spreadsheet always wins.

So the die is cast. Netflix is set to inherit the bulk of Warner’s intellectual property – a century’s worth of cultural real estate amassed over 102 years. Wizards, dragons, sitcom apartments, capes, swords, prestige TV. The whole mythological archive of late capitalism, handed over to an algorithm in a black hoodie.

For subscribers (that’s us), this means infinite beige. Endless content engineered to flatter the algo – “If you liked X, you’ll love Y” – and scrubbed clean of anything that might spook advertisers, regulators, or whichever strongman happens to be throwing a tantrum this quarter. You’ll get more seasons, more spin-offs, more “expanded universes” of shows you never wanted resurrected in the first place. A deepfake Tony Soprano. A multiverse where every franchise is immortal and nothing is allowed to end.

And it won’t just be the content that degrades. The terms will too. Soon enough, the base subscription won’t mean much. Want the good stuff? That’ll be an add-on. First a Warner add-on. Then an HBO add-on. All layered neatly on top of a service that’s already spent the last decade getting worse: constant price hikes, features carved up into tiers, password-sharing crackdowns, ads creeping into “cheap” plans. You know the drill. You’ve been living it.

This isn’t unique to Netflix. It’s alignment. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter – same movie, different cast. There’s a name for it: shittification. Platforms start out courting users, pivot to pleasing partners and advertisers, and once they’ve locked in control, they hollow the thing out for everyone. Until what reaches the user at the end of the pipe is, technically speaking, crap.

Look around. Social media is unusable. Search is pay-to-play. Online marketplaces are flooded with machine-generated sludge. That’s not a bug. It’s what happens when competition dies. When quality stops mattering. When the business model becomes extraction and the economic structure quietly mutates into techno-feudalism.

Quick refresher: feudalism wasn’t about capital – it was about land. Whoever owned the land owned power. Society organized itself around peasants working estates they didn’t control, in exchange for scraps of what they produced. Lords flattered kings; kings handled taxes and armies. Peasants had no rights. The lord could, in theory, ruin their lives on a whim.

Techno-feudalism is the same setup, just with digital land. Whoever controls the platform controls access, rules, and income. You’re not a customer in a free market – you’re a tenant. A user. Allowed to exist inside a walled garden under shifting terms, with no real rights and no meaningful exit. Try running a retail business in the U.S. without Amazon. Try writing critically about platforms without posting on one owned by another platform.

So yeah. We’re screwed. What now?

Here’s the unsexy answer – especially funny coming from someone living in Israel – but the only real counterweight to extractive megacorporations is the state. As a regulator, sure (see Western Europe, imperfect but at least attempting resistance). But more fundamentally, as a service provider.

At its core, the state is the biggest competitor any corporation will ever face. Roads. Healthcare. Social security. Education. Security. All provided outside the logic of profit maximization. In Israel, many of these services are bad – often very bad – so the public cheers privatization and corporate “efficiency.” That’s a mistake.

The choice isn’t between a bad state and a free market. The choice is between public services – including, yes, public broadcasting – that can be fixed politically, and private corporations for whom you are not a citizen, but a user.

And users don’t have rights.