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Notes -
I was reading this article and made a possible connection to the culture war.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-11/disney-star-wars-writers-of-royalties
It details a series of conflicts between writers of various properties and Disney, but I suspect the basic phenomenon (trying to avoid paying creators of IPs) is industry-wide.
It made me wonder how much of the specific Hollywood brand of "wokeness", radically altering or combining characters etc. is more about avoiding royalty payments to the established authors, shifting the writing to a writers room, where the product is the property of the corporation. Were these dumb fucking writers so happy to be allowed to doll up their creations with the latest political fashions that they were overjoyed to participate in the destruction of both the IP itself, and also the legacy authors, and for a lot less money than real writers cost? Ironic if true!
How much of this push to "diversify" is being run by the companies themselves to get cheaper creative labor? I don't know the answer to this question, but it would be enlightening to find out who actually owns the intellectual property of a lot of these "woke" shows/movies, and whether that differs structurally from the "classic" or just better made shows.
As the media model of television shifted to the streaming age, I would theorize there was a lot of structural changes that needed to happen. The companies didn't want to pay people on the old model, but young people, new people, cheap people from good colleges would work for relatively little money (well paid staff positions are far cheaper than royalties if your show hits it big). Because they're taking a shotgun approach to content, they need a lot of cheap writers. And if you doll it up in social justice, the kids will cheer for and demand their own economic subjugation.
You might be on something. In another message in this CW thread, someone implies that companies want their sector to be as lightly regulated as possible. However, it seems to me it is not always true. Think about children toys: if the regulations remain light, then there is no or less incentive to buy new toys compared to re-use older ones. If the regulations become heavier, then old children toys become dangerous. You should not re-use them. You should buy new ones. Why would the toy industry oppose it? In this case, it might be a win-win situation (children get safer toys, and toy companies get more money).
But you can also have the exact same phenomenon with "social regulation" or with authorship. It might be expensive to compete with the best works of the past. You have to hire talented people, to give them money, and even then you have a high failure risk. So what about lowering the bar? Just use whatever social trend to make the older works worse, out of fashion. And if it makes you free of the authors and their IP, even better, right?
This is well known as an economic phenomenon. Capitalists are not capitalistic. They can make more money as a more-regulated semi-monopoly than they can as a less regulated large company with many more competitors because of the lower barrier to entry.
In the industry I work in, holster manufacturing is crazy, there's thousands of companies, many of them one-man shops, because the regulations are very low. It's not a gun, there's no paperwork, no explosives, no hazardous shipping, etc. You get a very vigorous and responsive industry, but cutthroat. The firearms side is the opposite, there's a few conglomerates that own most of the smaller brands, new companies have a hell of a time getting off the ground and if they do, they get bought by the big companies and shelved or run into the ground. This is because the regulatory burden keeps most of the competition out.
As Milton Friedman put it, the two greatest enemies of capitalism are intellectuals and businessmen: the latter because they tend to push for regulation and government intervention for their own industry, even if they support a tough free market in general; the former, because they tend to push for regulation and government intervention for everyone else's industry, even if they support free speech rights for themselves.
Of course, that claim doesn't rule out non-liberal progressive intellectuals, who also oppose free speech rights for intellectuals...
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