Some said that the Kindle had sounded the old guard’s death knell. Others swore by name authors’ breakout crowdfunding success. Most recently, artificial intelligence has taken center stage. Depending on whom you ask, A.I. will either liberate creators or render them obsolete.

But amid the endless debates, somehow everybody missed that not only has the preference cascade already begun, it has reached critical mass.

What we’re witnessing today cannot be called a revolution. More accurately, it’s the aftermath.

The old order survived long enough for most people to assume it would always hold the center of pop culture. By the time its grip on authority began slipping, millions had already found other ways to discover books and the people who create them.

And here’s the kicker: The change took place so gradually that many of us haven’t noticed.

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The deep lore of Tolkien. The brutal action of Berserk!

Read The Burned Book now.

Shopworn as it is, that advice is correct. Unfortunately, many new writers misunderstand what conflict actually is.

As a result, all of their scenes begin to seem naggingly familiar. The plot technically has energy but loses steam with each turned page. And the reader loses interest.

So if the cause isn’t lack of conflict, what’s the problem?

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The deep lore of Tolkien. The brutal action of Berserk!

Read The Burned Book now.

But somewhere along the line, the standard talent pool seemed to dry up. The shortage of good ideas and film makers skilled enough to bring them to the screen, had Hollywood on the brink.

Then The Backrooms and Obsession came out of left field and trounced a Star Wars movie. Those indie films’ success was a revelation. One that smacked Hollywood across the face with the realization of where popular storytelling had been hiding …

YouTube.

According to recent reports, Hollywood studios are scrambling to acquire more internet-sourced horror properties like The Mandela Catalogue and Siren Head.

What’s ironic is, the creators behind those projects built enormous audiences long before the studios called. Instead of discovering unknown talent, Hollywood is negotiating with creators who have already proven themselves online.

Hollywood’s current rush to sign YouTubers is reminiscent of the indie film boom of the 1990s. Back then, studios like Miramax signed rising auteurs. But for every Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, there were ten hopeful directors who got used up and tossed out.

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The deep lore of Tolkien. The brutal action of Berserk!

Read The Burned Book now.

Their vision of a future without ownership seemed inevitable.

Then the unexpected happened.

Physical media refused to go quietly into the night. Vinyl records continued attracting new buyers. Small bookstores staged an unlikely comeback. And niche film studios are thriving on Blu-ray.

Even Zoomers, a generation raised almost entirely on streaming, have begun collecting movies, records, and physical books in growing numbers.

Many commenters dismiss the physical media trend as nostalgia. But their explanation falls apart under scrutiny. A twenty-year-old buying vinyl records cannot be nostalgic for an era he barely remembers. Nor is a film buff compiling a DVD collection in 2026 trying to relive the 1990s.

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The deep lore of Tolkien. The brutal action of Berserk!

Read The Burned Book now.

Yet readers still lose interest between those major set piece scenes.

Because the problem usually has little to do with the plot. Instead, it arises from answering questions too quickly.

Curiosity is the skeleton every story hangs on. Readers want to know how the detective will solve the case, if the lovers will reconcile, what waits behind the locked door. Every chapter raises questions the author promises to answer in the next.

Those questions keep readers turning pages. But too many new authors succumb to the temptation to give immediate answers.

What does that mean?

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Space pirates OD on the spice from Dune and wake up on Cthulhu’s couch.

Read Nethereal now.

These past few years, it looked like the plan was working. Streaming services placed thousands of movies a few clicks away. Audiences no longer needed to drive across town, buy a ticket, or plan an evening around a specific showtime. The future seemed obvious. Movie theaters belonged to another era.

Yet recent reporting suggests consumers may be less tractable than Hollywood thought.

Independent theaters across the United States are enjoying a renaissance, and younger audiences are leading the way. Many of the people filling those seats grew up with Netflix, YouTube, and smartphones. If any generation should have embraced streaming completely, it’s Generation Z.

Instead, many Zoomers are choosing to leave the house for their entertainment.

At first glance, the trend seems difficult to explain. Why would a generation raised on instant access willingly choose the slower option? Who wants to pay for a ticket when countless movies are already available at home? And why plan your night around a screening when you can start the show on your schedule, on-demand?

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“Don’t write in third person omniscient. Today’s readers can’t handle it!”

Maybe you’ve heard the deadpub smears againt omniscient narration:

“It’s confusing.”

“It feels old-fashioned.”

“You’ll never sell it.”

Supposedly, the narrative voice that carried The Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Watership Down is now a liability. Because—so oldpub would have us believe—modern readers, particularly younger ones, can’t fathom it.

But the idea that readers can’t comprehend omniscient narration isn’t just false, it’s insultingly false. In fact, you could be forgiven for calling it an instance of industry gaslighting: “Third person omniscient is dead! So lower your standards, water down your prose, do what the market says, and maybe you’ll get scraps from the Big Five’s table.”

But here’s what everybody’s missing: Omniscient narrative voice didn’t die.

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Let’s get the basics out of the way first: The One Ring is not a metaphor. It is neither a stand-in for atomic weapons nor political power, nor is it a commentary on World War II. It is not an allegory for fascism, communism, capitalism, imperialism, or any other –ism.

Tolkien stated the above points explicitly, repeatedly, and with the weariness of a man who knew exactly what he was up against. His tragedy was that of the linguist trying to speak to a civilization that had lost the ability to hear.

Because our society no longer reads; it scans. All day online, we listen to commentary from people who have not read The Lord of the Rings—never mind The Silmarrillion or Tolkien’s letters—and would not understand the material if they had.

Too many people only engage with Tolkien to the extent that they can bend and warp his work to serve as a vessel for their ideology. And so the One Ring, which was written with a precise and non-allegorical meaning, has become a kind of literary Rorschach test; another mirror in the Pop Cult funhouse. Readers; let’s be real here, movie-watchers, see in the Ring whatever they already believe about power, war, or politics.

That’s not just a misreading. It’s a desecration.

Why?

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That’s not hyperbole.

It’s our new reality.

Odds are, you’ve seen accusations like the above already. Amazon is being flooded with books churned out by large language models. Neither lovingly crafted works of fiction nor thoughtful nonfiction, they’re the textual equivalent of spam.

And here’s the rub: The publishers running these A.I. sweatshops actually brag that their books aren’t edited. Why? Because editing takes time and money, and their entire model depends on reckless speed. To them, publishing a book is just pulling a slot machine. If they slop ‘n drop onto Kindle Unlimited fast enough, maybe they’ll hit a payout.

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In other words, you’ll hear “film noir, but lit with neon instead of street lamps slanting through Venetian blinds.”

Or, if you ask the younger crowd, “Like, Blade Runner?”

By which they’ll mean the post-Ground Zero desecration, not the original. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Those definitions have been repeated so often, they’ve ossified into a meme: a shorthand aesthetic detached from its roots.

The irony is that cyberpunk began as a revolt against shallow genre formulas. Its defining authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and later Neal Stephenson, were reacting against the lifeless sterility of mid-century “hard” science fiction. They wanted sci fi to rediscover its guts: messy and human, with street-level consequences.

But in the process, their invention was itself sanitized and repackaged into the same kind of superficial spectacle it was meant to shake up.

To understand what cyberpunk really is, you have to start with its name. And the word “punk” does not mean what most people think.

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The YouTube channel Like Stories of Old recently explained this phenomenon with unusual clarity. His thesis: The crisis has nothing to do with CGI, color grading, or cameras. The real problem is that filmmakers stopped grounding images in the perceptual mechanisms people actually use to understand the world.

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Take-Two’s CEO even seemed to encourage physical ownership of the game.

But according to recent reports, the retail edition of this long-anticipated Grand Theft Auto installment will not include a game disc. Instead, customers will receive a download code inside of what resembles a disc box.

For those keeping score at home, the packaging will be physical. The game itself will not.

At first glance, that seems like a trifling matter. After all, most players will just download the files and begin playing exactly as they would have anyway.

And while yes, that transaction feels familiar, it marks a substantial change in the publisher-gamer relationship.

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You look at the draft, and the prose is tight. It’s got brisk pacing. The chapters end in the right places.

Yet readers struggle to stay invested in the story.

Many writers assume the problem is somewhere in the plot.

But often, the real culprit is missing consequences.

Every action in a story should have a proportional effect. A choice should create a new problem. Added responsibilities should come with victory. Mistakes should impose new obstacles. And all of these events should ripple outward, altering the circumstances surrounding the characters.

Without those ripples carrying them along, readers start bowing out.

Consider a simple example:

A hero ignores a warning and enters a forbidden ruin. Inside, he narrowly survives an encounter with a dangerous creature.

At first glance, that scene has it all: action, tension; probably even strong prose.

Yet if the encounter changes nothing, the sequence adds zero value. As a result, it’s disconnected from the rest of the story.

Oh, readers may enjoy the moment. But you can bet they won’t remember it.

Many authors unintentionally set their books up for this exact problem. Which can be hard to spot, because every scene works on its own. But for some reason, the whole is not greater than the sum of its part.

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That arrangement has been slowly changing. But now everyone is starting to notice.

Recent reporting and commentary have called attention to a growing trend. Productions that once would have been filmed in Los Angeles without question are increasingly heading elsewhere. Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Georgia, and Eastern Europe now compete aggressively for movie projects.

In his recent video, Dave Cullen points to the obvious explanations.

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Every book is different, but if you can make one general statement about the publication process it is this:

It’s slow. And that deliberate pace serves an important purpose.

Recent reporting suggests many legacy publishers are abandoning that time-tested philosophy. More and more authors report truncated production schedules, rushed editing, reduced marketing support, and books hitting stores before they’re ready.

Oldpub set out to optimize itself for volume. And succeeded. At the cost of quality.

That devil’s bargain mirrors a pattern that keeps popping up throughout modern culture. The line must always go up. And every organization is convinced it has to produce more. Few stop to ask whether more is actually better.

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For most of the twentieth century, gatekeepers had a stranglehold on information. Television networks dictated entertainment and opinion. Newspapers could make or break presidents. Big publishers determined which authors got read, and which stayed invisible.

The internet changed those rules. Anyone could create a website, publish articles, and build an audience. The web decentralized information like previous generations could never have imagined.

Google played a major role in that paradigm shift. Their search engine directed people seeking information toward top-ranked sources. In the process, they sent traffic to online publishers.

Everyone benefited … at least for a while.

Recent developments in A.I.-powered searches indicate that the former arrangement may be changing. More and more users receive answers directly from Google instead of visiting the web sites that host the original info.

That change sounds minor, but its implications are enormous.

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Their prose is elegant. They have solid pacing. The plot works exactly as intended. Yet the book doesn’t connect with readers.

Cases like this, in which all the pieces are there and seem to fit together can be hard to diagnose. Because the problem isn’t at the technical level. Often, it arises from the characters’ decisions.

When many new writers edit scenes, they’re focused on outcomes. They know where the story needs to go, which events must occur to get there, and what information must be revealed.

Which is all well and good. But the risk is reducing characters to tools for achieving those goals.

A believable character makes decisions based on his own priorities. A flimsy character’s decisions are dictated by the author’s priorities.

You’d think avoiding that misstep would be easy, but the difference can be surprisingly subtle.

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The second a movie succeeds, executives immediately start searching for the secret ingredient. Once they identify it, or think they do, studios spend years trying to replicate the result. Audiences, meanwhile, are subjected to a whole era of cinema defined by Hollywood’s new pet production strategy.

The process sounds reasonable. Yet the results often date themselves quickly.

Consider the visual differences between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. Or Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Those films look almost nothing alike. From their color palettes to their cinematography to their visual effects, they barely resemble one another at all.

Yet audiences embraced all of them.

And what lesson did studio executives take from their success?

Was it to let proven auteur directors pursue their creative vision? No.

Or that audiences respond favorably to beautifully photographed movies? Not so much.

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So they replaced confusing objectives with quest markers. Minimaps were added to assist with navigation. Hidden objects got highlighted. In sum, designers steadily eliminated obstacles that might prevent players from reaching the next objective.

The intention was understandable. But the results were mixed blessings at best.

Many modern games are indeed smoother than their predecessors. Their controls feel more intuitive. The user interfaces convey information more clearly. And players do spend less time wandering aimlessly or getting trapped by obscure mechanics.

And yet, a valuable aspect of gaming fell by the wayside:

Discovery.

Think back to classic games from the 1980s, 1990s, and early aughts. How often did you get lost? How many times did you get stuck? How many controllers did you break by throwing them against the wall?

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Every era eventually creates myths that reflect its deepest anxieties.

Generation Z is no different. According to recent reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the explosive popularity of the Backrooms and other forms of Gen Z horror has attracted growing attention from Hollywood and cultural commentators. Many observers focus on the aesthetic elements; the endless yellow hallways and empty office buildings.

Granted, that imagery is memorable.

But the symbolism underlying the visuals is far more interesting.

At first glance, the Backrooms seem absurdly mundane. Previous generations feared haunted castles, ancient tombs, cursed forests, and abandoned asylums. Gen Z fears fluorescent lighting and office carpeting.

Their anxiety sounds ridiculous until one asks a simple question: “What exactly is a liminal space?”

The answer is, a place designed to take people somewhere else. An airport terminal, a hotel hallway, and a shopping mall corridor: None of these locations are destinations. They are the places between places that exist only to transition their temporary occupants elsewhere.

Now, imagine that the transition never ends.

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Debt Reckoning is now fully funded on Kickstarter. Stretch Goal 1 is funding now, so if you’d like to support the project and help make the book even better, you can check out the campaign here.