On December 7th at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, Lando Norris won his first Formula 1 Driver’s Championship. It was on paper a three-way dogfight between himself, teammate Oscar Piastri, and the defending, four-time consecutive champion Max Vertstappen. There hadn’t been a title-decider with more than two contenders in the last race since Sebastian Vettel’s first championship win in 2010, but that statistical definition belies how uninteresting this fight has been.
The Ground Effect Era—named for the regulations that ran from 2022-25 where aerodynamics were enhanced by the ground effect on the floor of the cars, sucking the body of the machine to the track and making it more maneuverable around corners—was meant to create closer racing but ultimately was marked by domination. Verstappen defended his title three times in a dominant (if undriveable by anyone else) Red Bull, while other teams struggled to even get within striking distance of Dutchman, not unlike what had happened with the Mercedes cars of the previous Turbo-Hybrid Era.
In 2024, though, the McLarens introduced an upgrade package that made them overall the fastest car on the grid, sealing a constructor’s title. It wasn’t enough to catch Verstappen’s drivers points then, but set them up for their own dominant 2025. Piastri initially led the championship early in 2025, but fell off form mid-season, allowing Norris to eclipse him and Verstappen to keep chipping away. Still, it was no team fight like Hamilton and Rosberg or Prost and Senna, there was little on-track action between the two McLarens, and the season was marked more by team orders and radio conversations of fairness after pitstop fuck-ups than wheel-to-wheel combat. It was, at best, an interesting season to read about, but not one to watch.
This season finale battle happened on a rather weak Tilke track that only has two serious overtaking opportunities (despite what the bizarre and controversial 2021 season clincher might make one think), and Yas Marina will stay the deciding circuit for F1 at least through 2030. It’s a part of Gulf oil state’s big bucks push to attract westerners and make a bid to dominate the global entertainment industry by over-spending on motorsports, golf, wrestling, and even comedians. It doesn’t really matter if these things are entertaining or good products, but that they’re perceived as such, because, in this age of unfettered speculation, it raises the perceived value of all involved.
Happening on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula that same weekend was the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah. After the Netflix buyout of Warner Bros was announced, people like jury president Sean Baker took to the stage in Saudi Arabia to pontificate about the importance of theatrical windows. It’s a nice sentiment, and an honest one coming from Baker, just as certain as it’s part of the power-play going on in the Warner Bros buyout.
After it was announced Netflix’s deal with WB was going forward, David Ellison and Paramount Skydance launched a hostile bid straight to shareholders, offering $108 billion against Netflix’s $82.7. Ellison has allied himself with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, along with three Gulf oil state funds based out of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. They come with campaign promises of theatrical releases and changing the editorial line at CNN—one needs only look at what Ellison’s appointment of Bari Weiss (a “journalist” whose selling point is that she’s too stupid to understand why journalistic standards and practices exist) as the head of CBS News did to see a vision of what kind of de facto state media they might be proposing there.
Those fears are founded, but also somewhat irrelevant to the cultural shifts already going on. Anybody 30 years ago could’ve told you that Rupert Murdoch’s project with Fox News was slowly strangling TV news’ integrity to death, and the 24-news cycle of liberal network and cable stations made this endemic to the form of TV news itself. But that’s where the money is, and so went the money men.
Ellison’s right-wing editorial agenda is there, and it’s obvious. But focusing on it might miss the overarching battle for domination happening between Ellison’s camp and Netflix’s, a battle which is inevitable and will lead to a media industry hegemon. A Hollywood studio’s archive of movies don’t matter anymore as pieces of entertainment—definitely not in how we might assess their quality—they’re pieces of a content library that can boost brand value; these companies don’t sell things, they control images of things to boost value.
The media market, as it exists, interfaces with the public by what t-shirts they buy, what they stream while doing the dishes, and what propaganda they can consume, but at this point all of those earthly interactions with media might as well be equivalent to how Greek gods descend from Olympus to take their petty squabbles out on humanity. The people who these multi-billion dollar gambits have transcended from everyday life, and in separating themselves from the whole of humanity, have lost theirs.
In the “Who buys Warner Bros?” conversation, the competitors are the coldest capitalist machine in the media industry and an outright fascist backed by monarchs. In the large-scale media world the war’s already over, and, to borrow from Leonard Cohen, everybody knows that the good guys lost. It’s best to not cry about it, or try to propose how the media sector in its current form could be taken back by the right businessmen or bureaucrats. It’s time to play a different game and build our own world.