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IN LATE May, Amazon bought 97-year-old movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion. Although that is a huge amount of money, there is something almost routine about the transaction at this point. MGM owns some of the rights to James Bond and a few other popular franchises, so there is talk about how big tech is about to ruin more nice things.

Obviously, Amazon is trying to lure more customers to MGM鈥檚 catalogue, and sure, it is possible that Amazon will ruin our love for Agent 007 with a romcom about wacky high jinks when James Bond marries a surveillance drone. But I am done yelling about the death of media and dumbing down of content.

At this point, we should know that new media companies eat the intellectual property of old media companies for breakfast. Capitalism may be the culprit today, but this is a process that goes back centuries.

When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, it was almost immediately turned into a stage play. In 1910, the inventor Thomas Edison turned it into one of the very first movies. Since then, Frankenstein鈥榮 iconic monster has found its way into television series, streaming shows, comics, video games and TikTok memes. Each time the monster jumps to the next form of media, creators have a chance to reinvent it 鈥� recontextualising its scientific horrors in the modern world, for example, or making its outsider monster into a hero.

If you want to go into galaxy brain mode, one can argue that Homo sapiens is a tool-user who invented media to hammer meaning together out of chaos. I think often about the recent discovery of a cave in Borneo where people painted pictures of animals and humans on the ceiling more than 40,000 years ago, using the latest Palaeolithic technologies: ochre inks, brushes and probably bamboo scaffolding that allowed them to reach high places to paint. therianthropes, or human-animal hybrids 鈥� in this case, 鈥渂ird people鈥� drawn with beaks and tails.

It is the first known example of a story about non-existent beings. Maybe it is also one of the earliest moments in history when a new medium 鈥� painting 鈥� swallowed up stories that had previously been spoken around the fire.

鈥淵our ancestors saw cave paintings of bird people, but today you watch a Supermanshow on your phone鈥�

Flash forward tens of thousands of years to the 1950s, and media philosopher Marshall McLuhan was arguing that 鈥渢he medium is the message鈥�. By that, he meant that the devices we use to spread our stories are as meaningful as the stories themselves. Living at the dawn of television, McLuhan was interested in the way TV could deliver stories into people鈥檚 homes in a way nobody had ever experienced before in history. Millions of people could be watching the same bad sitcoms in their living rooms at exactly the same time!

Over the past century, media innovation has accelerated so much that it feels like each generation has built its own system for communication: we have had the film and radio era, the TV era, the videogame era and the social media era. Each has spawned its own kinds of fandoms, references and rituals, slightly opaque to the older and younger generations. Even if we are still telling the same tales, we are able to enjoy them in new contexts.

Palaeolithic humans climbed into a hidden cave to see paintings of bird people, but today you sit on a train and watch a streaming Superman show on your phone. Both stories may seem to focus on the adventures of a person with the power of flight. But one is told in a difficult-to-reach location, far from everyday life. The other is distributed everywhere instantly, to anyone who can stream or pirate it.

As our civilisations have grown in size, we have needed new kinds of media to build meaning. We have also figured out new uses for our story tools. Moguls of the content world have squeezed financial value from movies and TV, then sold them to Amazon.

Meanwhile, governments have weaponised memes into propaganda. Most of all, though, humans have figured out how to preserve stories, using every era鈥檚 most futuristic devices. Perhaps at its most fundamental level, media is a capacitor that stores up meaning and discharges its cultural power long after we are gone.

So when I find out that Amazon has eaten MGM, I have two contradictory reactions. I am worried about what will happen to all the cultural history that the behemoth that is Amazon has just dragged into its digital vaults. Maybe it will be forgotten, or 鈥渞ebooted鈥� into something awful. And yet, I know it is inevitable that stories must move from one platform to another. The question is who will ultimately benefit?