“The thousands of workers engaged in this enormous, multi-union Hollywood strike – something America hasn’t seen since 1960 – represent the frontline of two battles that matter to every single American. You might not naturally pick “writers and actors” to be the backbone of your national defense force, but hey, we go to war with the army we have. In this case, they are well suited to the fight at hand.
The first battle is between humanity and artificial intelligence. Just a year ago, it seemed like a remote issue, a vague and futuristic possibility, still tinged with a touch of sci-fi. Now, AI has advanced so fast that everyone has grasped that it has the potential to be to white-collar and creative work what industrial automation was to factory work. It is the sort of technology that you either put in a box, or it puts you in a box. And who is going to build the guardrails that prevent the worst abuses of AI?
Look around. Do you believe that the divided US government is going to rouse itself to concerted action in time to regulate this technology, which grows more potent by the month? They will not. Do you know, then, the only institutions with the power to enact binding rules about AI that protect working people from being destroyed by a bunch of impenetrable algorithms that can produce stilted, error-filled simulacrums of their work at a fraction of the cost?
Unions. When it comes to regulating AI now, before it gets so widely entrenched that it’s impossible to roll back, union contracts are the only game in town. And the WGA and Sag-Aftra contracts, which cover entire industries, will go down in history as some of the first major efforts to write reasonable rules governing this technology that is so new that even knowing what to ask for involves a lot of speculation.
What we know for sure is this: if we leave AI wholly in the hands of tech companies and their investors, it is absolutely certain that AI will be used in a way that takes the maximum amount of money out of the pockets of labor and deposits it in the accounts of executives and investment firms. These strikes are happening, in large part, to set the precedent that AI must benefit everyone rather than being a terrifying inequality accelerator that throws millions out of work to enrich a lucky few. Even if you have never been to Hollywood, you have a stake in this fight. AI will come for your own industry soon enough.
And that brings us to the second underlying battle here: the class war itself. When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.”
Since the WGA strikes began, the studios have been trying—and failing—to turn fans against the writers (and now the actors). I reported on a very strange SDCC this year, which was full of labor conversations and solidarity along the full spectrum of the fan/creator divide. As one member of SAG-AFTRA told me during an awareness-raising demonstration across from the convention center, “The people that I have met today have been all thumbs-up, V for victory, hugs. We love it, and we’re very pleasantly surprised.”
While we’re all talking about both the WGA/SAG strikes and Barbenheimer, I hope everyone realises that the entire reason this exists is because Christopher Nolan stood up to Warner Bros against pushing their entire cinematic slate onto streaming in 2021, by taking his next film to another studio.
Then, as an act of petty revenge, they decided to deliberately move their single biggest movie of 2023 (and arguably WB’s biggest non-Batman/Harry Potter movie in DECADES) directly onto his release date.
So no, the Barbie Marketing isn’t “so good it helped another movie”. The Barbie Marketing Machine was specifically designed to get back at someone who dared to stand up against WB executives.
It was a calculated move of malice by soulless corporate fuckeroonies.
no Male Author Moment has ever made me cringe quite as viscerally as the ending of Grapes of Wrath and that was a full decade before I found out about this
Sanora Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was buried by the publisher after Grapes was published. It was eventually released in 2004, a year before her death.
The horses do indeed wear earplugs to protect them and to prevent spooking. The horse and rider both are generally required to wear hearing protection in this particular kind of show.
those 19th century poets weren’t wrong about romanticising risking your life to go for a walk while it’s storming outside. i went out to run my errands today in a skirt and long coat without an umbrella and there’s something about being soaked to the bone and shaking while weighed down by several tons of fabric clinging to your skin tighter than a lover that makes you feel the kind of alive you normally only get from snorting coke or playing with live electrical wires.
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn’t make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you’re being snobbish or condescending when you’re just trying to be specific
