FilmStruck is shutting down at the end of November.

One of the most popular films in the history of the film, the film is one of the most popular films in the world, and one of the films of Warner Bros. and the Criterion Collection, along with art-house distributors like Kino and Flicker Alley. WarnerMedia, formed when AT & T got approval to acquire Time Warner Inc. in June, announced Friday that FilmStruck will be shuttled down to the end of November, a victim of corporate impatience with "niche services" the Korean movie site DramaFever. The strangled corporate newspeak of the memo announcing the closure, with its reference to the "learnings" to be gleaned from the FilmStruck experiment, the same kind of helpless rage as the tortured syntax of Donald Trump's tweets-it's so painfully revealing of the kind of great carelessness that is the hallmark of power right now.

As warner gears up to face down Disney with its direct-to-consumer streaming service, launching next year, it's clear that the company has no interest in catering to fans of its back catalog, only in chasing the largest possible audience for its new releases. What's not clear is why it's a zero-sum game, and why efforts have been made to keep the audience up to date. As the screenwriter John August has recently pointed out, there are still times that are not available to stream, and the availability of older is a patchwork. This is a slow erosion of cultural heritage under the guise of infinite availability. Titles that are not available to the public, will be used to assign them to classes, and will eventually become part of the cultural awareness.

Conversations about gatekeeping and elitism tend to equate cultural capital with actual capital, and assume that critics, artists, professors, and the kinds of people who make up film-festival audiences are able to persuade and educate hence the enduring power of attacks on "elites" making $ 40,000 a year). More powerful, and far more insidious, is the massive land grab by tech companies for which culture is only a series of metrics, who have rampaged through media and the arts in pursuit of impossible growth, whose business practices are in thrall to the "move fast and break things "ethos, where the company can" pivot "and fire its staff is a mark of health, not of shortsighted, rapacious, and deeply unstable management. Over and over again stories pop up about the climate of corporate terror that reigns at companies like Amazon and just this week, Netflix, yet they remain models to which others aspire.

When the cultural playing field is restricted to behemoths like Disney and AT & T, there is less chance of anything human-scaled surviving. The indiscriminate sprawl of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon's vast libraries is part of their allure; you get lost in the figurative stacks, and you can unearth gems and surprises. But for the most part these are self-reinforcing, telling you what you like based on what you've watched before, making inferences about you as a member of a certain demographic. If the only art you see is the kind of art you've already heard of, then you're missing the challenge and the thrill of true discovery.

FilmStruck did not care who you were: It's about you, you know it. It is a team of smart women Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to movies Its personality shone through tightly curated collections A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It has been offered inventive double-feature and extensive archives in ways that have been creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and movie was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can not be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.

What's left in a post-FilmStruck world? There are television channels catering to cinephiles, notably Turner Classic Movies, but that is not much use for those without a cable subscription. There's a lot of "classics" on Netflix and Hulu, but they rarely made anything before 1960. There are other streaming services: one of the best is Kanopy, an eclectic service -bones interface and a limited number of monthly views. There's DVD borrowing through your local library, or there's the gray market of movie piracy, for those willing to navigate it-the last thing any studio should want to encourage. And there's good old-fashioned physical media, which can not be taken away by the whims of corporate owners, but consider that you could have a year of FilmStruck for the price of three Criterion Blu-rays, and without any plastic boxes cluttering up your coffee table.

We have to fight for niches, our subcultures, our hobby horses-but we grow to welcome new people in. That was something that FilmStruck excels at, and makes its loss.