Metrics kill creativity. There are two examples of this I’ve used time and again in presentations and papers on this subject:

First, consider the shopping mall. Victor Gruen, the Austrian architect behind the first enclosed mall, wanted to create a vibrant, community-oriented space modeled after European city centers — a place where people could gather, stroll, and connect, shielded from the elements. Yet, as developers and retailers applied metrics to maximize revenue per square foot, Gruen’s artistic vision was subverted. The modern mall became a monument to consumerism, optimized for foot traffic and sales, stripped of its communal soul and urban vitality. They became soulless, concrete tombs purposefully optimized for sucking money out of consumers’ pockets.

Then they died — and they became a sort of sad joke on their way out.

A parallel story unfolded in the world of office design. The cubicle, invented by Robert Propst in the 1960s, was conceived as a flexible and empowering alternative to the rigid, hierarchical office layouts of the past. Propst’s “Action Office” was meant to foster both privacy and collaboration, supporting the well-being and productivity of workers. But as companies seized on the cubicle’s modularity to squeeze ever more employees into shrinking spaces, the original intent was lost. The cubicle became synonymous with monotony and alienation — a symbol of corporate optimization run amok, where the metric of floor space cost per employee outweighed anything else.

These cautionary tales reveal a pattern: when creativity is measured, quantified, and optimized for narrow goals, it collapses under the weight of its own commodification.

To put it another way, artists create wonderful things with vision. Bean counters destroy them in an attempt to wring out every dollar they can.

And then — surprise, surprise — the artist’s original vision typically resurfaces. Once the suits shrug their shoulders and say “I dunno why this is all falling apart…it’s optimized!” some other artist comes in, pitches the same decades-old idea, and the thing that should have been done in the first place gets done.

That’s right. The original shopping mall designs looked far more like town centers and open-air malls look now. And Propst’s Action Office looked more like what’s being sold these days as “innovative new facilitators of collaborative workspaces”.

Neither is new! They’re old innovations that were twisted into bottom-line-driven homunculi by corpos, left for dead, and then allowed to reanimate from the grave by desperation after the corpo-optimized version failed.

We Measure What Matters — Until It’s All That Matters

Metrics annoy me. I know I’m in marketing and it’s a sin to say that, but they really do. The problem is that metrics, by necessity, oversimplify scenarios that are usually pretty dang complex.

We don’t track whether people laugh at a funny marketing email. Or if they’ll remember it tomorrow. Or mention it to a friend. We only track if they click on the call-to-action at the bottom.

Granted, that’s largely because we have a hard time tracking those other things, but what starts as “track what we can” quickly becomes “this is the only thing that matters”.

This becomes a problem when you expand that optimization philosophy to something even more human and ephemeral than someone’s response to an email. Say, entertainment. But what we’ve been witnessing for years — the complete collapse of the entertainment industry in the United States — is largely due to that philosophy.

Track what matters: the money.

The shortsighted will just attribute this thinking to greed, but it’s a lot more complex than that. It has to do with where the money comes from. As the industry (be it film, books, or games) gets larger, it needs more capital to stay alive.

(Think about the inverse square law and how it affects biology. Animals can only grow to their average size for a reason. You can’t have a beetle the size of a Volkwagen because its density would be far too large for its surface area; in turn, its passive respiratory system wouldn’t be able to provide enough oxygen for it to live.)

As these industries (at this point defined by large corporations or conglomerates) get bigger, they need more…stuff…to operate. All kinds of stuff, from logistics support to HR staff to office furniture and commercial space. That stuff eventually outpaces the earnings potential of the entity, especially if said entity is poorly managed.

Either before this point (because of optimism) or after (desperation) the entity will take money from investors. This, sadly, means that one metric instantly becomes the only metric that matters: growth.

Not even earnings. Just growth. How much bigger are you getting every quarter?

As you can imagine, this doesn’t really help with the whole Volkswagen-sized beetle problem. In fact, it tends to lead to the organization — or entire industry — collapsing in on itself like a neutron star.

What Does This Have to Do with Books and Movies?

Okay, so we’ve gone through my oversimplified treatise on economics — but how does that relate to the collapse of entertainment?

Simple. As more and more publishers, studios, and game developers go down this road of uncontrolled growth and VC money, a funny thing happens: they get more and more dependent on the very metrics that are killing them.

They enter a sort of panic state where the only possible win is to hit a point of “too big to fail.” That’s the objective, because no other objective fits the numbers. And sadly we all know that “too big to fail” isn’t a very realistic goal.

We’re all experiencing that panic state. It became obvious to me when every movie being released was some Marvel trash fire. And when Star Wars suddenly had around 500 properties going at any given time.

What those signals indicated was risk aversion. Creative industries had suddenly become terrified of being creative.

Now it’s even worse, because the mainstream is also terrified of being cancelled thanks to social media echo chambers.

The point is no longer “how do we entertain people?”; the point is “how do we reach our quarterly numbers without losing our jobs?”

Consolidation, Fragmentation, and Audience Fatigue

Audiences in the US are sick of it. We can see that in declining ticket sales on Marvel movies, complete rejection of new-release AAA games, and mass migrations to foreign entertainment sources like Korean TV shows, Japanese manga, and a growing interest in Bollywood films.

Consolidation is just going to make it worse. (See: Disney). But also the fact that consolidation allows the industry to make really stupid decisions — such as raising prices, chasing trends, or gatekeeping creatives. Naturally, these decisions will be made based on ONE metric: $$$

Fragmentation of distribution isn’t doing the mainstream any favors either. When the big beetles can’t control consumer buying behavior by lording over all the channels of distribution, they have to give the consumers what they want to maintain sales. And the mainstream has absolutely no intention of giving us what we want. They can’t, because the metrics don’t support it.

Audience fatigue is a real thing. There’s a reason why there’s so much negativity surrounding every film release, every new show, and most bestselling books. We, the audience, have lost trust in the mainstream sources providing that entertainment. When you don’t trust the source, you scrutinize and look for problems. It becomes very easy to find things you don’t like, focus on them, and lose your mind.

Indie Will Prevail

There’s never been a better time to be an independent creative than right now, simply because the alternative is falling apart. We might have small boats, but unlike the big houses and studios, our boats aren’t sinking.

We have the luxury of freedom. We can create what we want, knowing that it won’t appeal to the mass market — but we don’t care because we don’t have 60,000 employees on payroll. We can take risks. And we are under far less scrutiny than any large entertainment entity.

In the past, we saw this entire thing play out in the microcosm of the comic book industry. Now, it’s really playing out in the video game space with small teams producing games that outsell AAA titles with $300m budgets. It’s also been playing out quietly in the publishing sector, but I think the curtain is slowly lifting on how bad the problem has actually become.

Take Brandon Sanderson, who openly states that he writes longer and longer books because they sell better on Audible while at the same time garnering poorer and poorer reviews on those books. He’s proudly trading quality for sales — and for now, he’s making a killing doing it.

But a lot of readers, even staunch fans, have turned against Sanderson this past year. It’s another bubble that’s likely to burst…and probably soon. Since Sanderson looks like he’s attempting to create his own category (a sort of author/celebrity/brand that’s largely self funded) through ownership of his IP, logistics, and fulfillment, his company Dragonsteel is dancing dangerously on that line where he’s losing the agility of an indie author while lacking the protection of a large publishing house.

Or so I suspect. I don’t follow him to such a degree that I’ve studied his ledgers, but I’m making that guess based on what’s readily visible. And he already appears to be chasing trends and making decisions based on $$$ far more than most authors have or will.

Anyway, the point of all this is that indie creatives are in a really good position. Unfortunately, we have to deal with a ton of uncertainty because the future isn’t going to look anything like what we have now.

Hollywood isn’t suddenly going to open its doors to indie authors, because Hollywood as we know it will soon be dead. The big publishing houses aren’t going to clamor for undiscovered talents because those houses won’t be around in ten years. They’re all in panic mode, grasping to make what they’ve become survive rather than assessing where they went wrong.

What we’re on the precipice of is an entirely new landscape of opportunities. Unknown now, but at least they’ll be driven by creativity again.