Again, I disagree with your basic conclusion - which I interpret broadly as "downmarket changes art." The propagation of Brownies didn't denigrate the work of Ansel Adams. Serrano only became a name because Jesse Helms had a hard-on against the NEA; Mapplethorpe, by way of contrast, was technically exquisite and artistic as hell. he also shot large format.

It's interesting to me that two different people have mentioned GoT in this thread without recognizing that GoT is a much cheaper, much more conservative show than Rome:

HBO wouldn't greenlight the series, in fact, if it couldn't be brought in at about the same money as Showtime's Pillars of the Earth:

...which cost less per episode than Star Trek: The Next Generation before you adjust for inflation.

Netflix hasn't published how much they spent on Arrested Development. Got a friend who worked it, though. He got 1/4 his union rate.

Yes - it can be argued that production has gotten substantially cheaper without breaking much of a sweat. At the same time, why do movies cost so much more? Cleopatra was a legendary budget buster in 1963 at $31m. Adjusting for inflation, that's $243m. How many movies in the past ten years have cost that much or more? Wikipedia tells me nine. if you look at their inflation figures, Cleopatra is barely in the top 20, the oldest movie on the list by 30 years or more.

So it's not that broader availability has destroyed technique. It's just destroyed it on Youtube. The Youtube culture is exactly that presented above: fukkit, it's only Youtube. At the same time, every single shitheel on Youtube dreams of the day they break into "mainstream" media where they will be surrounded by the very professionals they're slagging.

Worked with another group that shall remain nameless. They're big on Youtube. They had to do a commercial for a real company. Think Fortune 50. They were held to real standards. And they tried getting by on their 7Ds and their Lego follow focuses and all the rest of the bullshit but by the time they were ready to re-up for another campaign, they were a full union pop shop with a pair of C300s, Fisher dollies, a 10-ton G&L package and legit honest-to-god Teamsters to drive it all around.

My main complaint against the Youtubers is they're mostly what the kids watch, and they're producing shit. They're creating a culture where shit is A-okay because shit is what they know. And they watch Freddie Wong and he tells them that your lenses don't matter and then they see something like this

And it's not talent, it's not skill, it's not technique, it's FUCKING MAGIC because the collective culture of all these talented young kids and their hopes and dreams is being smothered under the "soft tyranny of lowered expectations."

Steve McQueen was a photographer before he was a director and he's pretty goddamn good.

And we're now in a universe where our good directors come from photography because the youtubers have given up.