This week it was announced that UK broadcaster ITV will be taken over by US media giant (and Trump Ballroom donor) Comcast. The acquisition will be implemented through Sky, which Comcast purchased in 2018..

Additionally, Comcast is planning to separate its entertainment businesses from its broadband, wireless, and enterprise services. The new entertainment division will include ITV, Sky, and other NBC Universal assets, including streaming platform Peacock. Maybe we can look forward to a streaming platform where you get to watch Universal monster movies, Rachel Maddow, and every season of Coronation Street since 1960 all for one monthly subscription. And might we get a Prime Suspect reboot? Set in Baltimore? We definitely should expect a Downton Abbey theme park.

So ITV was established in 1955 as Independent Television, a way to provide British audiences with a commercially funded counter to the BBC monopoly. Subsuming it into another British broadcaster is, of course, a slap in the face to that old-fashioned ideal of media independence. But selling it to an international buyer really kills it dead. ITV (Independent Television) will be part of a company that owns not just one broadcaster, but multiple broadcasters, radio stations, networks, studios, production companies, resorts, and venues.

Sky, forged in the fires of Mount Murdoch, has always been a place of commercial grappling. Seeing Comcast take over Sky in 2018 – coincidentally also the second year of a Trump presidency – wasn’t great for the morale of British TV, but that kind of thing had been seen before. But ITV is a lot of British territory to cede at a time when it’s more important than ever to keep control of your national assets.

“Ahh, but that’s the way of things,” you sigh. Ok, first of all, sighing is bullshit. Stop that. Secondly, we’re not talking about the Way Of Things. We’re talking about what is good for real people who live in the real world. Those people who gave us things like the rule of law, and weekends, and Wikipedia.

Losing control of cultural production

Europe, feeling squeezed by authoritarians, has been trying to become more independent of American influence – as a simple matter of security. Culture – what idiots call “content” (and I have been one of those idiots) – is a principle component in security, growth, and resilence. We have seen, even in the past month, how the so-called “culture wars” actually have real world, very dangerous, consequences. Culture isn’t fluffy and abstract, it’s physical and immediate and affects you at home.

Keeping control of your cultural production is going to become increasingly important across the world as international bullies, and the AI oligarchs who love them, try to force their own cultural outlook into concrete political, economic, technological, and social realities – things that will affect you at home.

I used to think that maybe the UK government was playing political games when it came to ignoring the power of its own media sector. But now, I think maybe they’re just not very smart people. It’s also possible that the bulk of the privately-educated government see culture as just a hobby you do between jobs, a soft job you fall into after you leave Downing Street, that it’s not an industry at all but something you do with the friends you knew from Cambridge.

Obsessed with a fictional working class Britain which hasn’t existed for half a century, the government is constitutionally unable to imagine that the British creative working class – from advertising to game design to music to media tech to stage to film & TV – is one of the country’s most important assets, economically and in terms of real, international power. While the government cosplays getting grimy people in hardhats back to work, Yorkshire is becoming a top global center for game design. And those designers are working far longer hours than coal miners (the Coal Miners Regulation Act of 1908 restricted mine work to 8 hours a day).

Superpower suicide isn’t just for America anymore

Historian Timothy Snyder has introduced the new term “superpower suicide” for what is currently happening to former global empires. In this phenomenon, elites deliberately, with gusto, dismantle the very things that made them successful. In the US, we see this is in the deconstruction of the country’s dominance in science and medicine, its world class universities, its longstanding political and moral authority, and its economic reliability.

It’s hard not to see some of the same symptoms in the UK’s approach to its own media sector. 

Given the US collapse, and frantic scurrying in Hollywood, the UK could step up to become THE dominant center of media creation globally. There is a long-legacy of trust, quality, cooperation, expertise, and innovation already in place – and a workforce operating at the highest level of expertise in the world. It would only take a decision and a tiny bit of investment. The UK could become the global capital of storytelling. Not “content”, for god’s sake, but entertainment, insight, culture, vision – things with value.

Let everyone else build the data centers. Instead, invest in talent and the tools and facilities that will support original culture production. When the AI crash comes (and it will come), and no one will be able to accumulate enough dopamine to make anything, the UK will have a unique asset – workers who can imagine and realize things that no one else can, with a global audience who badly needs them.

But in the meantime…

UK Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced this week there will be cuts to performing arts funding in higher education as part of the trimming of the government’s Strategic Priorities Funding Grant. The SPG budget is helps supplement teaching costs for high-cost courses and subjects deemed to be of national importance. The total amount of this year’s Strategic Priorities Funding Grant has fallen by £50.9 million, compared to last year’s. The shortfalls have been absorbed by cuts in the arts, archaeology, geography, nursing, computing and history. Chemistry and engineering subjects seem to have been spared.

Liz Hutchinson, chief executive of London Higher, a non-profit that supports higher education in the capital, said:

“Once again, creative education is first in line when savings need to be found. This is short-sighted and self-defeating. Creative industries are a UK growth priority and one of London’s strongest economic assets, supporting one in five jobs in the capital and contributing billions to the economy. Cutting the funding that trains the next generation of creative talent, while calling creative industries a priority sector makes no sense.”

The fact that the UK is already an English-language, talent-rich environment, with a global reach, makes it yummy pickings for companies who desperately need to accumulate more stuff to increase shareholder value.

Right now, UK the government is pushing for a substantially increased defense budget, but fortifying your country doesn’t mean much when you’ve already surrendered your most valuable assets without a shot being fired.