If there’s an iron law for twenty-first-century capitalism, it’s that private equity and big corporate capital will enshitify anything it can get its grubby hands on. Most recently, the finance class was in the news for destroying the Red Lobster chain, depriving us regular folks of a decent meal out. The same forces are also setting out to ruin the entertainment industry and those who work in it.

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Daniel Bessner, a contributing editor at Jacobin, penned “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” a must-read feature on Hollywood. He deconstructs the streaming industry, tracing the history of film and television through their early years, into the deregulation 1980s and ’90s, through to industry consolidation and derisking. He highlights how the promise of creativity, freedom, and decent work in the industry have been slaughtered at the altar of intellectual property milking, worker exploitation, and the race to profit.

As Bessner writes, the original strategic streaming play was to pump up subscriber numbers, dominate market share, and cash out at scale. But the strategy failed, particularly as credit became more expensive, and now the industry is flailing, bilking its writers and actors and foisting ads on subscribers in a grotesque return to something a lot like cable TV.