Eugene Chung is managing director of TechStars in New York City. Eugene is an investor in technology companies and is also an indie filmmaker. Follow him on Twitter.

When Seth MacFarlane takes the stage at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday to host the Academy Awards, it will be 84 years after the first such ceremony in 1929 and 44 days after the death of Infogami co-founder and anti-Hollywood/anti-SOPA activist Aaron Swartz.

I love films. My father, an opera singer, taught me at an early age to appreciate the dramatic arts, and I was a theater actor in my youth. Some of my greatest heroes in life are filmmakers like Passolini, who gave so much of themselves to their work. I'm an indie film director, and I've been on the other side of the spectrum in big-budget filmmaking. I should be working in Hollywood today — but I'm not.

The reason is complex, but it's related to Swartz and the forces that conspired against him — the same forces that helped engineer Internet-regulating legislation such as SOPA and PIPA. Ironically, those forces were originally cut of the same disruptive ilk as Swartz.

There was once a time when Hollywood was the Wild West. In the early 1900s, a rogue group of artists, seeking to free themselves from the expensive yoke of Thomas Edison's film patents, left the developed heart of the American Atlantic to settle in remote Los Angeles. These renegades would go on to form the foundations of Hollywood as well as herald an era of unprecedented creative experimentation.

In many ways, these early filmmakers were the spiritual siblings of today's hackers. While hackers are disrupting everything from corporate America to venture capital, today's indie filmmakers have the opportunity to unsettle Hollywood as we know it.

The decreasing cost to create video is transforming film and TV. The trend that has recently become so pronounced that there are comparisons to Gordon Moore's 1965 observation about components in integrated circuits doubling every year. The visual quality of amateur video is improving rapidly, aided by cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark III, which lend the common creative some of the visual power that would have cost several orders of magnitude more in bygone years.

Film Disruption

This trend is rapidly upending the establishment. In a recent conversation I had with a veteran media executive, he remarked, "I never thought in my entire career that I would say it is a good time to be in content. But now, I think it is a good time to be in content."

In many ways, this hearkens back to the freedom extant in the foundation of the industry more than 100 years ago. Pauline Kael had this to say about the early days of cinema:

When Méliès photographed his magic shows, when D.W. Griffith recreated the Civil War or imagined the fall of Babylon... they were just beginning to tap the infinite possibilities of movies to explore, to record, to dramatize... movies were so inexpensive that they could be hailed as the great democratic art form. Then, as businessmen gained control of the medium, it became almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new. Movies became in one way or another remakes of earlier movies, and until inexpensive pictures from abroad began to attract large audiences the general public probably believed what the big studios advertised — that great movies meant big stars, best-seller stories, expensive production. The infinite variety of what was possible on film was almost forgotten, along with the pioneers, and many of those who loved movies lost some of their own vision. They began to ask what cinema "really" was, as if ideal cinema were some pre-existent entity that had to be discovered; like Platonists turned archeologists, they tried to unearth the true essence of cinema.

Writing in 1968, Kael's sentiments about cinema's aesthetic crisis sound as familiar to the modern ear as if it were written yesterday.

And yet, a disruptive startup that can capture and combine the most excellent cultural elements of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley is rare. These two crown jewels of American ingenuity — proud of their distinct achievements and distinct ways of life — do not co-exist well. Last year's vitriol surrounding SOPA and PIPA is sufficient evidence of this.

One of my friends at a large technology accelerator recently recounted to me the number of companies he has seen take on this Sisyphean task and fail. Regarding the success of a startup's founding team, "It is better to have a team of two dumb jocks than to have a dumb jock and a smart nerd who have nothing in common," he said. He added that the problem was inherent in culture, some of which was encapsulated in the "pay me now" mentality of Hollywood versus the "pay me later" mentality of Silicon Valley.

The Coming Golden Age of the Indie Genius

In any art form, curation has always played a critical role. Living writers always find it hard to make a name for themselves because society wisely relies on the passage of time to decide which works are relevant and which can be discarded as ephemeral period pieces. Filmmakers today are more like the painters of the Renaissance, who relied on aristocratic patronage to make their living. Knowledge compounds, as any ambitious hacker who shuns corporate America knows today.

A Renaissance painter thus needed glory in this life to be remembered in the next (a fact not true of our best writers), for without the exponential growth bestowed by the financial patronage of aristocrats, their natural genius would have languished. The hermetic Thoreau could craft a masterpiece alone in the woods, but does anyone doubt the critical role of the Medicis and the Popes in the painting of the Sistine Chapel?

Filmmakers have always been spiritually closer to hackers than the businessmen who run Hollywood. One of my most poignant memories of working on a big-budget studio film was one day when I asked the film's director to recount his meeting with our studio execs. He proceeded to grab a handful of coins nearby and pretended to vomit them out of his mouth — the coins scattering grotesquely across the table.

For now, the most talented filmmakers are beholden to the aristocratic patronage of the studios, but eventually, cheaper production costs and unlimited digital distribution have the potential to usher in a new Golden Era for the singular creative genius in video. What happens then? This admittedly ambitious asymptote has intriguing cultural implications. But for now, Hollywood sneers at the iPhone cat videos that plague YouTube.

This story has been written before. The broadcast networks held an oligopoly on television for some time, and when the premium cable channels first emerged, they were disparaged. A media executive I know compared our time with the early days of cable, citing the dubbed Jacque Cousteau videos (Discovery Channel), late-night sex movies (HBO) and hurling (ESPN) that formed the content backbone of the early pioneers. At first scorned, the established order hastened to purchase these channels as content improved and audiences swelled.

Curation Is King

Regardless of the many motley forms the future can take, curation and distribution will continue to be key. On this front, a titanic battle is currently being waged that includes the likes of Comcast, the Hollywood majors, News Corp, HBO (Time Warner), Apple, Google and many others. Google's ambitious goal is to be on half a billion smart TVs by 2015, and consumers and pundits alike eagerly await Apple's much-promised television.

In the future, the narrative goes, we should be able to walk into our homes and say "Siri, I'm sad," and Siri would light up our HD television with the latest funny viral video, or give us the most recent episode of our favorite sitcom. Instead of having to flip through channels, Apple would give us a stream of content catered to our tastes that we could change at a whim.

"Siri, next. Siri, next. Siri, I want to watch the fifth episode of the first season of Game of Thrones." In this world, the channel disappears, and the consumer ceases to differentiate between content that was streamed from YouTube versus content from prime-time television.

The retort of the existing power players to such fanciful dreams is strong. Comcast argues that it still owns the coaxial cables, which it can use to throttle content delivered to a future iTV. The rise of 4G LTE will hardly put a dent in this fortress of pipes, as spectrum deficits loom large for the foreseeable future.

The Hollywood majors and HBO still control the best content, reports of the death of the blockbuster are greatly exaggerated, and the ascendancy of the long tail is premature. Disrupting Hollywood and the existing power players is thus a more difficult quandary than at first blush.

Hacker’s Revenge

Nevertheless, brilliant young hackers have solved harder theoretical problems than these by the time they finish grade school, and some of them are now dedicating themselves to turning the disruption of Hollywood from theory to reality.

On Jan. 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment in an apparent suicide. For months, he had been persecuted by the Federal Government for hacking JSTOR via MIT, an act rooted in his principled belief in Open Access. Since 2010, he had helped spearhead the fight against Hollywood to stop the measures that would eventually become SOPA and PIPA, a battle in which he lived to tell the tale.

In both conflicts, his fundamental opponents were the perverse influences behind today's copyright laws. Hollywood, the principal patron behind SOPA/PIPA, was first formed more than a century ago because a few rogue artists wanted to get as far away as possible from the constraining influence of Edison's patents. Dearest Hollywood, the irony is not lost on us, and know this: Hackers and indie filmmakers alike are coming after you. Laugh at us, vilify us, persecute us with your mighty resources — it doesn't matter.

Because in the end, we're going to win.

Eugene Chung is managing director of TechStars in New York City. Eugene is an investor in technology companies and is also an indie filmmaker.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Cinetics