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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Man, I just have very little sympathy for these writers. Any job that a substantial amount of people would do for free in their spare time is obviously going to have immense downwards pressure on pay. These people consciously took a risk with their career, and now they're getting burned for it. The issue they're having is a difference in the supply of aspiring writers and demand.

Here's a Reddit take with 1k upvotes from this post:

I 100% support the strike, but it will be brutal for many others in the industry, especially if it goes on for months. I work in the industry and was impacted by the '07 strike, which lasted three months.

It's not just about the pay cheque. What people outside the industry might not realize is that most union workers also need to earn a certain amount of money (or a certain number of credits) in order to maintain health insurance. This becomes impossible when there is no union work to be had.

There's a sickening reverence the blue tribe has for those working in creative fields. These writers AFAIK usually earn more (albeit less consistently) than the grips and grunts responsible for the rest of the production. But through their outsized influence on culture and the zeitgeist (the real compensation of their work and a reason it has the status people chase) you get a situation like in the quote above taking place. This strike affects the financial security of countless others in the industry, who (at least overwhelmingly so on Reddit) have somehow convinces themselves this is OK.

I don't actually know too much about the specifics of the Writers' guild union, but they leave me with the same instinctual disgust I have for unions in general. I hope someone can link me to some well written and sourced pro union articles to educate me on this, but comments like these in the same Reddit post leave a bitter taste in my mouth

Scabs are detested by picketers because scabs can break the strike. If enough scabs join in successfully, then they can outnumber the union and effectively cause its dissolution. If you're scabbing, be ready to be treated absolutely terribly. Some places may even hire private security to escort scabs to/from work.

I get the theory behind the usefulness of collective bargaining and how it should result/has resulted in better worker treatment, but god, the aesthetics are just awful. Just seems like collective bullying and the imposition of economic dead weight to me.

As a Europoor who never had the privileged opportunity to work on global cultural defining work, let them stifle the American media machine into the dirt. Maybe Netflix can fund some more cool German or British works.

source: https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/135adyi/the_writers_guild_of_america_is_officially_on/

As for the AI question. High budget productions will be the last affected, with generative art or text models. Right now, Ai can't replicate top talent, but it can replicate a lot of the low quality writing and CGI that's rushed out of low budget media. We will see Paw Patrol be automated years before a season of GOT has AI paintings in the background. Which still means that most shows will still be heavily affected, as most shows don't have anything like the budget of a GOT. The biggest change this would bring about first, is more, nicher, and cheaper shows, but also a further squeezing in the winner's take all reality of creative profession to decide who gets those scant jobs in prestige TV.