Striking Out?
The tradition of unions striking for fair wages, better working conditions, and a sense of equity from those in power to determine these things is contingent in many ways on those in power not being able to create the thing the union provides. If the teacher’s union strikes, there are no replacement teachers thus management is forced to listen and compromise. The only element that stands in the way of the strike are scabs—non-union teachers willing to cross that picket line and while they exist, scab labor rarely works out in favor of management. They are people and are subject to public humiliation, scare tactics, financial intimidation and are branded for life once the union succeeds in their quest.
New technology levels that model. As new technology made popular music easier to access without paying for it, musicians were left in the dust. As new technology made it easier to get published, the ability for writers to make a living was gutted. Live theater is on life support and artists are now calling for a government bailout.
The American theater is on the verge of collapse.
Here’s just a sampling of recent dire developments: The Public Theater announced this year that the Under the Radar festival, the most exciting of New York’s experimental performance incubators, would be postponed indefinitely and later announced it was laying off 19 percent of its staff. The Humana Festival of New American Plays, a vital launching pad for such great playwrights as Lynn Nottage and Will Eno over the past four decades, was canceled this year.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the country’s oldest and most storied regional theaters, recently announced a second round of emergency fund-raising to remain operational. The Lookingglass, a major anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, is halting production for the year. The Brooklyn Academy of Music laid off 13 percent of its staff. BAM’s Next Wave Festival, which helped catapult generations of forward-thinking artists to prominence, presented 31 shows in 2017. This year, it will present seven.
Apparently, the aging white audience for theater prefers Netflix. The younger audiences, the ones any art form requires to continue breathing, are more focused on being famous on Tik Tok or making bank on OnlyFans and YouTube.
Google is now offering up an AI program designed to help or replace journalists. With the freelance writing rate hovering somewhere between $0.03 and $0.05 per word, this is nearing the final cut that garners that death by a thousand.
Any time it is workers versus greed plus new technology, the workers lose. Every time.
The dual strike of the WGA (writers) and SAG-AFTRA (actors) is about all the things a traditional strike asks for except that the enemy in this case is new technology. The last big Hollywood strike occurred long before streaming was even a glimmer in the eyes of the studios. It didn’t occur to most when Peter Jackson created hordes of digital orcs in massive battle scenes that he was handing the movers and shakers of Hollywood a tool to replicate extras. Audiences delighted by PIXAR and computer animated movies like The Polar Express had no idea that the technology that gave us the updated Star Wars characters could effectively replace human beings on screen. Writers wrote about sentient artificial intelligence coming back in time to kill Sarah Conner but had no idea that they were all her, battling for survival in the wake of technology that could easily replace them.
I imagine a room filled with musicians, radio disc jockeys, journalists, theater artists, and movie theater owners all sitting with their heads in their hands looking at the current strikes and muttering “Been there, done that.”
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”
Hollywood Studios’ WGA Strike Endgame Is To Let Writers Go Broke Before Resuming Talks In Fall
Except that isn’t the endgame, is it?
The endgame is to continue leveraging new technology to effectively replace the artists that are demanding unreasonable things like fair wages with non-human scabs. The thing about AI is that you cannot publicly humiliate it, cannot intimidate it, and it doesn’t give two fucks about crossing your picket line. It also works for free.
The endgame is to have AI programs write the scripts and a few lucky writers hired to punch them up. To digitally replace extras with cyber-people on green screens. To digitally freeze actors in order to crank out sequal after sequal without ever having the actors demand more money or age. If audience taste has anything to do with it, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are fucked. We love our Hulu and Amazon Prime. We loveour CGI. It’s as easy to suggest that the Hollywood machine is only chasing us as it is to say it is a predatory monster trying to gut the very people who make their product. We aren’t going to the movie theaters like we used to, we aren’t supporting with our dollars and eyeballs films without the splash of CGI. Those we do are outliers and exceptions.
Any time it is workers versus greed plus new technology, the workers lose. Every time. Just ask the monks replaced by the printing press or the livery drivers with their horse-drawn vehicles.
The industry, like those before it, is changing because of new technology. Even the streaming industry is being disrupted. I hope the writers and actors can carve out a bit more time but like the old school reporters being ushered out of newsrooms like aging cattle, the endgame is still coming. Once it does, in those thousand cuts, it will be up to artists to find another way to create amazing work and maybe get paid to do it. Musicians figured out that if they couldn’t rely on the income from album sales, they could go on tour. Taylor Swift has been so successful with her live concerts apparently her Eras tour has actually bumped the American economy. Writers turned to SubStack and some make serious cash. Perhaps it isn’t the AMPTP but the very model of doing business in Hollywood that needs to shift.
In the meantime, why not get off your couch and go see some live theater or read a book by someone you’ve never heard of? Maybe go to a local bar and listen to a band play an acoustic set or catch some live poetry? Those artists have been busting their asses for slave wages for a long time and will certainly appreciate your patronage because a government bailout for artists is never going to happen.
