Even the orcas are organizing.
On the ninth day of the Writers Guild of America strike, no one on the picket lines knows about the chaos at sea. They don’t know that the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, will join them, or that 340,000 UPS workers and 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District employees will vote to authorize the same, or that Sega of America will soon become the largest union shop in gaming. And none of those people have any idea that as they craft signs and fill water bottles, orcas are amassing in unprecedented numbers in Monterey Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. They have attacked approximately 250 vessels since 2020. One of their organizers, White Gladis, became an internet folk hero with her actions off the Iberian coast. Pod by pod, they learn how to strip the rudders from powerful boats and leave them adrift. On the ocean, as in business, a successful disruptor inevitably becomes a failing incumbent, torn apart by smaller competitors. As Ned Beatty’s character says in 1976’s Network, these are the primal forces of nature.
Welcome to Hot Strike Summer.
America’s economy is historically speculative: From cotton to crypto, it makes the youthful mistake of falling in love with potential. With no more worlds to conquer, the only real estate with any speculative potential is affinity-based: online platforms, virtual realities, transmedia franchises. But what happens if the vendors of vaporware try to run a dream factory?
“The future of entertainment will be the future of everything,” says John Rogers, creator of Leverage and The Librarians, “which is watching an enormous number of houses of cards that have been built over the past 30 or 40 years start to collapse.”
Rogers’ word choice there seems pointed. Cultural production’s current landscape, the one the Hollywood unions are bargaining for a piece of, was transformed forever 10 years ago when Netflix released House of Cards. Now, in 2023, those same unions are bracing for the potential impacts of generative AI. But the potential impacts of AI on filmmaking and scriptwriting represent only two of the shifts technology has brought to the world of cultural construction and consumption.
This spring, I spoke to around 20 entertainment professionals, in fields ranging from production design to pornography, and asked them about what they believed could revolutionize culture most. They talked about studios applying the “move fast and break things” model to over a century of profitable filmmaking and how it resulted in a consolidation of power that Hollywood’s Golden Age producers could only dream of.
With the fall of the Paramount Consent Decrees in 2020, any US studio with the right capital could once again open its own movie house and have control over what’s played in it. As negotiations between Hollywood studios and SAG heated up in July, the use of AI in filmmaking became one of the most divisive issues; one SAG member told Deadline “actors see Black Mirror’s ‘Joan Is Awful’ as a documentary of the future, with their likenesses sold off and used any way producers and studios want.” The Writers Guild of America is striking in hopes of receiving residuals based on views from Netflix and other streamers—just like they’d get if their broadcast or cable show lived on in syndication. In the meantime, they worry studios will replace them with the same chatbots that fanfic writers have caught reading up on their sex tropes.