It is now possible, with the toolchain available to a single person on a normal laptop, to produce work that ten years ago would have required a team. The work is not toy work. Films are coming out — short-form, mostly, but real films — assembled by individuals using language models for scripts, image generators for keyframes, video models for motion, audio models for sound, and a small amount of glue code to push the artifacts through Blender and a non-linear editor. Visual systems, generative installations, dome films, interactive worlds — all the things that used to require a production house — are appearing in the wild with one name on the credits. The capability is real. The capability is also rented. I want to take that observation seriously rather than treat it as another instance of the platform-versus-protocol argument. Every layer of the new toolchain sits, for almost every solo practitioner, on top of an inference API whose terms can be revised on a Tuesday. The model weights belong to a company.…