Every Revolution Looks Different. Human Nature Doesn’t.

Why we keep falling in love with technology

Every few years the entertainment industry falls in love.

Not with a film. Not with a filmmaker. With a technology.

I’ve watched this happen for more than thirty-five years. First it was digital video. Then interactive television. Then 3D. Virtual Reality arrived promising to replace cinemas. NFTs were going to reinvent ownership. The Metaverse was apparently where we would all be living by now. Today the conversation has moved on to AI-generated films, YouTube creators and microdramas. The names change, the headlines become ever more breathless, but the pattern rarely does.

Phil Mackenzie recently described this cycle perfectly. An early signal appears. Journalists declare the beginning of a revolution. Venture capital pours into the sector. Conferences spring up overnight. Every consultant suddenly becomes an expert. LinkedIn fills with confident predictions about the future. Then, almost as quietly as it began, reality catches up. The excitement cools, investors become more selective, and the industry slowly rediscovers the fundamentals it temporarily forgot.

That doesn’t mean these technologies are unimportant. Quite the opposite. They matter enormously. The mistake is believing they change human nature. They don’t. They simply change the tools through which human nature expresses itself.

One of the most common misunderstandings is the belief that technology creates talent. Take the extraordinary story of Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms videos attracted hundreds of millions of views before leading to a feature film backed by A24. Headlines quickly declared YouTube the new Hollywood, as though uploading videos had suddenly become a guaranteed pathway into feature filmmaking. But that’s not really what happened.

YouTube didn’t create Kane Parsons. It revealed him.

The platform simply allowed millions of people to discover work that resonated before a producer had to make a financial decision. In many ways YouTube has become the world’s largest talent scout and the world’s biggest test screening rolled into one. Hollywood no longer has to guess whether audiences might care about an idea. Sometimes the audience has already answered the question.

This isn’t entirely new. Comic books launched film franchises long before social media existed. Podcasts have become television series. Best-selling novels have always attracted producers. Even film festivals have served this purpose for decades. Raindance was founded on the belief that audiences could recognise exceptional talent before the wider industry caught up. What has changed is the speed and the scale of that discovery.

The same applies to the current excitement surrounding microdramas. We’re constantly told this is a market worth billions today and perhaps tens of billions tomorrow. Those numbers may well be accurate, but they don’t tell the whole story. Look beneath the headlines and a more interesting picture begins to emerge.

Much of this audience growth is being driven by diaspora communities, regional language audiences and viewers who were poorly served by traditional broadcasters. These are people consuming stories from their own culture, on devices they already carry everywhere, in formats that fit naturally into their daily lives. That isn’t necessarily evidence that long-form storytelling is dying. It may simply demonstrate that previously overlooked audiences have finally found content designed around their habits.

What’s particularly fascinating is that the companies succeeding in this space often resemble gaming businesses more than traditional film studios. Their expertise isn’t simply making stories. It’s understanding behavioural psychology. Cliff-hangers arrive every minute or two. Episodes encourage immediate continuation. Freemium models, virtual currencies and reward systems borrow heavily from mobile gaming. Netflix encourages binge-watching. Microdrama platforms often encourage habitual returning. Those are similar outcomes achieved through very different mechanisms.

Artificial intelligence presents another version of the same story. Since 2022 hundreds of AI studios have appeared, alongside an extraordinary number of software companies promising to revolutionise filmmaking. Almost every week another tool appears capable of generating more convincing images, voices, animation or editing. Production is becoming dramatically easier, cheaper and faster.

Yet one question remains stubbornly unanswered.

Who is paying to watch?

There is an enormous difference between someone saying, “That’s clever,” and someone reaching for their wallet or subscribing to watch the next episode. Curiosity has never been the same as commitment. Engagement has never been the same as loyalty. The distance between creating AI-generated images and building a sustainable entertainment business remains surprisingly wide.

This is hardly unusual. Throughout film history, technological breakthroughs have consistently reduced production costs while leaving audience demand largely untouched. Digital cameras became affordable. Editing software became accessible. Visual effects became democratised. Each innovation lowered barriers to creation. None removed the challenge of persuading another human being to care deeply about your story.

That’s why the fundamentals continue to matter. Every successful film, platform, production company or entertainment business ultimately rests on remarkably familiar foundations. Strong intellectual property. Compelling storytelling. Genuine audience connection. Talented people with distinctive voices. Those principles haven’t become less important because machines can now generate moving images. If anything, they’ve become even more valuable.

What has changed is how talent is discovered and how stories reach audiences. Discovery has become decentralised. Distribution has become global. Audience feedback arrives instantly rather than months later. The mechanisms are different, but the underlying purpose remains exactly the same.

Phil Mackenzie makes another observation that deserves more attention. He compares TikTok Shop with QVC. At first glance they appear worlds apart. One belongs to the social media age; the other emerged in the late 1980s. Yet both are built on precisely the same insight: people enjoy being entertained while they shop. The behaviour hasn’t changed. Only the infrastructure has.

History is full of examples like this. Netflix didn’t invent television. Spotify didn’t invent music. Airbnb didn’t invent hospitality. Uber didn’t invent taxis. They each recognised an existing human behaviour and rebuilt the infrastructure around it. Innovation often succeeds not because it changes people, but because it removes friction from what people already wanted to do.

For filmmakers, this may be the most useful lesson of all.

Instead of asking what technology will dominate next year, perhaps we should be asking what audiences will still want ten years from now. They’ll still want stories that surprise them. They’ll still want characters they recognise in themselves. They’ll still want to laugh, cry, hope and occasionally be frightened in the company of strangers. Those needs are older than cinema itself.

When I founded Raindance in 1993, filmmakers worried about getting past broadcasters, distributors and studio executives. Those gatekeepers still exist, but they are no longer the only route to an audience. Technology has undoubtedly changed that. What technology hasn’t changed is the audience’s remarkable ability to recognise authenticity when they see it.

After more than three decades in independent cinema, I’ve become deeply sceptical whenever somebody announces that everything has changed forever. Usually, only part of the picture has changed. The tools evolve. Distribution evolves. Business models evolve. Human beings remain wonderfully, frustratingly consistent.

Every revolution in entertainment eventually discovers the same truth.
Technology changes quickly.
Human nature doesn’t.

And that, perhaps, is the safest investment any filmmaker can make.

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From Elliot’s Notebook

I’ve lived through enough “once-in-a-generation” revolutions to know they seem to arrive every three or four years. Each one promises to replace everything that came before. Each one changes part of the business. None has replaced the need for imagination, courage and great storytelling. That’s oddly reassuring. It means that while software will continue to evolve at breathtaking speed, the most valuable skill a filmmaker can still possess is understanding another human being. That’s something no technology has yet managed to automate.

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