The Circus on Strike
The Circus on Strike
"They say they want more bread...!"
Our last two (free) slices of Radio Free Pizza explored a phenomenon we named cultural austerity: the manipulation (systemic or deliberate) of cultural expressions, entertainment, and communication platforms to shape public perceptions, values, and behaviors to preserve and reinforce the existing power dynamics, political structures, and socioeconomic hierarchies of the prevailing system. By promoting choices and behaviors among consumers that align with the interests of the ruling class, cultural austerity aims to secure consent for policies and practices that maintain the dominance of the capital order, with the result of obscuring broader social issues and discouraging collective solidarity among the working class.
As an apparatus of the capital order, the mainstream corporate media has promoted identity politics among liberals and reactionary traditionalism among conservatives to generate partisan divisions apparent (as we’ve seen) even at the level of language. With this ideological conditioning intense enough to produce divergent partisan dialects—which don’t just change in different directions, but which also modify the language in different ways—it’s of course no wonder that the economic populists of the left and right should have met a challenge in communicating across political divides.
Though the social engineering of cultural austerity managed to lend a veneer of consent to the capital order, that system’s fundamental contradictions lingered nonetheless. These contradictions have required more targeted applications of Clara Mattei’s industrial austerity—“having the state directly intervene in labor relations to try to disempower the working classes”—such as the U.S. Congress’ 2022 intervention in the face of a disruptive labor strike by Railroad Workers United preceding the 2023 Ohio train derailment, covered previously on Radio Free Pizza.
Other notable labor actions followed that strike-breaking intervention and its disastrous consequences that weren’t met with the same industrial austerity. All told, Alyssa Fowers reports that about 323,000 American workers have already gone on strike in 2023. 150,000 more may join them on 14 September if the United Auto Workers launch the strike their members authorized just ten days ago.
Notable too is the fact that the majority of these striking workers belong to an industry closely associated with the professional-managerial class. Believe it or not—with 160,000 of those workers belonging to the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and with Nick Robertson reporting more than 11,000 more belonging to the Writers Guild of America (WGA)—the multi-union 2023 Hollywood strike represents more than half the number of workers involved in U.S. labor actions so far this year.
The multi-union Hollywood strike of 2023 started in May with the WGA, joined ten weeks later by SAG-AFTRA. Both unions have more on their mind than just what numerals appear in their take-home percentages. As Andrew Dalton reported in July, AI technology “has pushed negotiations into unknown territory, and the language used can sound utopian or dystopian depending on the side of the table [using it].” With AI’s use growing, “star actors fear they will lose control of their lucrative likenesses. Unknown actors fear they’ll be replaced altogether. Writers fear they’ll have to share credit or lose credit to machines.”
Besides expected alarm over its members’ shrinking compensation, the WGA launched their strike to prevent AI generations from having the status of literary material—“a term in their contracts for scripts and other story forms a screenwriter produces”—or of source material—“their contractual language for the novels, video games or other works that writers may develop into scripts”—to exclude AI from screenwriting credits and to ensure that screenwriters still receive those credits even while using AI as a creative tool. A release from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), however, counters that the WGA’s demand “‘is complicated given AI material can’t be copyrighted.’”
Subsequently, SAG-AFTRA launched their own strike in opposition to what it characterizes as the AMPTP’s desire for the ability:
“to scan a background performer’s image, pay them for a half a day’s labor, and then use an individual’s likeness for any purpose forever without their consent […] to make changes to principal performers’ dialogue, and even create new scenes, without informed consent […] [and] to use someone’s images, likenesses, and performances to train new generative AI systems without consent or compensation.”
SAG-AFTRA seems to have good reason for concern: after all, as James Vincent reported in 2019, the software already exists for producers to “play fantasy football with their movie, inputting a cast, then swapping one actor for another to see how this affects a film’s projected box office.”
While the AMPTP responded to the actors’ characterization that “its offers included an ‘AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performers’ consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations,” this alone seems to have been insufficient to assuage SAG-AFTRA’s concerns about “the need to protect ‘human-created work’” and guarantee its creators’ rights to its use after digital modification.
In August, Brent Lang put the strikes in the broader context of the industry:
[T]he writers and actors who are on strike argue that they’ve been left behind by the industry’s embrace of streaming—a transition that’s put more debt on companies’ books, with less profits to show for it. Writers and actors say that the royalties they make [from streaming] are a fraction of what they were when they would show up on cable TV or in syndication [...] At the same time, the compensation packages of media moguls keep climbing, with the CEOs of the major media conglomerates earning an average of $32.6 million in salary, stocks and other perks last year. [...] And many of these business chiefs have been enriching themselves even as the companies they lead have seen their share prices crater. Disney’s market cap, for instance, dropped 43% from 2021 to 2022, while Comcast’s fell 34%, Paramount Global’s lost 44%, and Netflix’s tumbled 51%.
Hence the July uproar when Bob Iger, though professing (as quoted in Deadline) to “understand any labor organization’s desire to work on behalf of its members to get the most compensation and be compensated fairly based on the value that they deliver,” nonetheless said of the striking writers, “There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic”—though the Disney CEO receives a compensation package worth ~$27 million per year, as Fortune reported when Iger re-assumed the position in November 2022.
Of course, one would be forgiven for inferring that Iger considered any expectations at all to be unrealistic, given that just two days prior a different Deadline article quoted another studio executive saying of the strike, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
But with SAG-AFTRA having launched its own strike the day after Iger’s comments, and after the WGA strike passed its 100-day mark last month, Shannon Power reported how the Disney CEO had begun changing his tune. As she relates his comments during a financial results call:
“Nothing is more important to this company than its relationships with the creative community […] And that includes actors, writers, animators, directors and producers. I have deep respect and appreciation for all those who are vital to the extraordinary, creative engine that drives this company and our industry. It is my fervent hope that we quickly find solutions to the issues that have kept us apart […] I’m personally committed to working to achieve this result.”
Apparently either the financial results discussed on that call, or the forecasts for future quarters, reminded Iger of the creative community’s importance to the entertainment industry.
While labor actions tend to focus on the raw numbers—to focus, that is, on what money the workers take home—I appreciate the unions’ emphasis on the value of the human touch and, more importantly, on preserving its capacity to earn economic rewards. Here I’m reminded of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ben Shapiro in May 2022 when they speak (at ~4:54) of autonomous vehicles:
SHAPIRO: Would you be in favor of restrictions on the ability of truck companies to use [autonomous vehicles] specifically to artificially maintain the number of jobs that are available in the trucking industry?
CARLSON: In a second. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high-school-educated men in this country […] That’s the same group whose wages have gone down by 11% over the past thirty years. The social cost of eliminating their jobs […] is so high that it’s not sustainable, so the greater good is protecting your citizens. Look, capitalism is the best economic system […] but that doesn’t mean that it’s a religion and everything about it is good […] What I care about is living in a country where decent people can live happy lives.
I agree with Carlson in principle—I too care about the ability of decent people to live happy lives (I know: how brave of me to say it)—but I believe he misses the real tragedy of the situation. Technological innovations that should be celebrated for relieving labor, for allowing drivers to turn their attention to other experiences and deploy their talents in other trades, are instead feared for the disruptions they bring to a socioeconomic status quo that keeps the working class in a precarious relationship with their jobs and, therefore, with their personal finances. The decreased opportunities and increased risks that attend precarious personal finances diminish the potential happiness available to the average citizen while simultaneously reinforcing their dependent condition within the capital order—which, being built on private ownership of the means of production, positions employers to profit as handsomely as ever from technologies that reduce payrolls.
Whether in autonomous driving, chatbot screenwriting, or the “digital cloning” of background actors that Pranshu Verma reports as dating to 2018, the proliferation of AI technology in recent years suggests to me that it (or otherwise the digital innovation that has thus far culminated in it) deserves consideration alongside natural resources, physical infrastructure, industrial machinery, and finance capital as one of the economic means of production.
So, in the case of the Hollywood strike, maybe the question becomes: how can creative workers seize control of it?
I don’t have a ready answer—I’m not sure, for example, how one goes about seizing the data centers that the film industry’s AI relies upon—but one idea kicked around in the back offices at Diaphora Co. at least attempts to give creators a greater share of their work’s economic value, until such time as an answer reveals itself.
As a first step, we considered registering the company’s logo as a trademark. The business organization of Diaphora Co. would own that recognizable design identifying the products of its collaborators, who would own shares in the company.
(Registering a trademark might not be the first step that executing this plan would require, but whatever, that’s how I remember the discussion starting.)
These primary shareholders would therefore gain from that trademark’s ongoing growth in value as the company continues releasing products, in addition to gaining from the revenue their own releases generate. Through a direct public offering (DPO), Diaphora Co. could issue a secondary class of shares onto the securities markets, the sales of which would generate capital to further expand operations.
Those secondary shares could be traded in over-the-counter markets, or made available to investors in the style of Legion M, “the first media company in history designed to be owned by fans […] using disruptive new equity crowdfunding laws”; the hyperlinked release explains that, “enabled by the JOBS Act, […] equity crowdfunding is about allowing the general public to participate in early stage PRE-IPO investing, a domain that for the last 80 years has been the exclusive purview of venture capitalists and high-net-worth individuals.”
New collaborators joining in the future would also receive first-class shares of Diaphora Co.—awarded, perhaps, in an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)—as the company’s releases under its trademark furthered ongoing trade of its secondary shares. In this wise, Diaphora Co. would become a kind of workers self-directed enterprise (WSDE), wherein the involved collaborators engage in commodity production—books, records, comics, film, etc.—and, acting as the enterprise’s directors, distribute revenues toward the development of future releases.
Following from the theoretical discussions surrounding WSDEs, I think we could call this mutualism adapted for independent media in the digital economy. I guess then that media releases like those described above would become one of the last commodities (understood in the Marxist sense) persisting in the social market economy before communism’s final dawn, when AI and robotics have become so ubiquitous that no one ever needs to work again, or however the theorists say it will be like.
Because one of Diaphora Co.’s ongoing collaborators advocates strongly for cryptocurrency, we also discussed potential ways of adapting that sector’s technology to this ownership framework. While it’s been maybe a year or two since those discussions took place—and these discussions only lasted about a cup of coffee—the ideas that arose in them bear some distant resemblance to the tokenized products developed by Backed Finance. As Liam J. Kelly reports:
Backed is a DeFi project working in the tokenization and real-world asset sector. This means it’s attempting to onboard popular traditional assets, such as stocks and bonds, onto the blockchain [...] Backed Finance’s assets include a tokenized version of Coinbase’s COIN stock, an S&P 500 index fund, and several different tokenized bond offerings.
I think you see where we were headed: tokenized shares of Diaphora Co. Of course, as Kelly notes, we weren’t the only ones thinking about tokenized securities:
The niche, initially heralded as one of blockchain’s key use cases, has gained serious steam of late [...] tokenized securities on Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis hit $225 million last year and just last month Avalanche launched a $50 million tokenization initiative to spur activity.
I guess we would’ve called ours something like the Diaphora coin. (Unfortunately, a quick search for “cryptocurrency $DIA” reveals that we’re too late to claim the obvious ticker symbol.) Regardless, we didn’t get far enough to check details like that: the SEC’s campaign to regulate all crypto-assets besides bitcoin as securities kept these discussions in the daydream stage.
Obviously similar considerations have dampened other entrepreneurial ventures, artistic or otherwise. “Backed Finance users, for example, must declare that they are not U.S. citizens” because, as of August 2023, “‘The current regulatory environment in the US presents too many uncertainties for blockchain-based financial innovation.’”
Nonetheless, while waiting for clarification on the regulatory environment (or for the world after the regulatory institutions collapse, whichever comes first), we can still hash out what a coin from Diaphora Co. would involve. Though I’m hardly an expert, our ideas involved establishing a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) operating on smart contracts allowing for decentralized governance and decision-making by token holders.
In the DAO of Diaphora Co., decisions on subjects such as fund allocation, project proposals, and changes to the organization’s protocols would be made by token holders who participate in the network. Diaphora Co. collaborators—i.e., creators releasing products bearing the company’s trademark—would receive some additional distinction in the DAO, such as a non-fungible token (NFT) to reflect their status as first-class shareholders, conferring some additional and as yet undefined influence over governance. Such a structure would constitute a more democratic and transparent way of managing corporate decision-making to benefit the creators who develop a company’s products with less need for intermediaries.
Of course, DAOs come with challenges, including ensuring effective decision-making, preventing malicious activities, and addressing potential vulnerabilities in the smart contracts that govern their operations. I don’t pretend to have the expertise required for any of that. For our purposes here, the important factor—that which confers governance over the enterprise and the distribution of its revenues—is the use of tokenized securities (first- and second-class) representing shares of Diaphora Co., deployed in an incorporated DAO, to give creators producing work under its trademark more control over the use of their work and a greater share of the economic value their works generate.
These tokens could also gain the subjective value required to circulate on the marketplace through an additional mechanism: conferring voting rights to exert some influence over the creative direction guiding the development of a company’s arts and entertainment products. In this manner, the DAO structure can empower an audience with governing capacity over the intellectual properties that populate our cultural landscape.
There’s an interesting precedent in the history of superhero comics for empowering audiences to make editorial decisions, found in the outcome of Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo’s four-issue Batman storyline “A Death in the Family” (1988), edited by Denny O’Neil. As Jake Rossen reports:
O’Neil’s idea to have readers cast their own votes gained momentum within the company. Starlin needed no convincing and wove a four-issue plot […] that sees [Robin] beaten nearly to death with a crowbar and left to die in an explosion.
An ad at the conclusion of the issue breathlessly told readers that Robin’s ultimate fate was in their hands. “Robin will die because the Joker wants revenge, but you can prevent it with a telephone call,” it read. Dialing one 900 number cast a vote for his survival; dialing another would help seal his doom. Each call cost 50 cents.
The lines were only open for a 36-hour period on September 16 and 17, 1988. Approximately 10,614 calls were received. Of those, 5271 backed a second chance, while 5343 threw dirt on Todd’s face. Robin would die, executed by a margin of just 72 votes—though that may not have represented 72 people. At least one anti-Robin activist admitted to calling in four times to cement the sidekick’s death.
If such mechanisms for audience governance were more commonly employed, then it seems doubtful that Comicsgate (covered previously on Radio Free Pizza as a link between cancel culture and comic books) would have arisen as such a virulent backlash by some creators and fans against what they perceived as a coordinated reinvention of mainstream superheroes. Other fans, too—not reactionary traditionalists, but even members of that reinvention’s targeted demographics—have found this social engineering similarly tiresome, as shown in Eden MacDougall’s editorial “I’m tired of comic books queerbaiting LGBTQ fans” from 2021.
In my view, mainstream publishers performed that coordinated reinvention with an underlying agenda of social engineering to promote (recalling the work of McGuigan) a kind of ‘consumptionist multiculturalism’ acceptable within the framework of identity politics, palatable to the professional-managerial class but alienating both longtime audiences and the demographics these reinventions intend to court. While publishers provide a world for their heroes, with editors maintaining consistency of setting between numerous character’s particular mythologies, the consumer culture of late-stage capitalism encourages the use of these heroes’ sagas (and the worlds, characters, and mythologies they involve) as instruments of social engineering to defend the capital order.
However, a DAO structure could confer upon its audience the opportunity for decentralized governance over the canon of a fictional universe shared between intellectual properties. In this way, fans could “vote with their dollars” through the native tokens they hold to guide editorial decisions at a publisher. Under such a model, audiences can exert more direct control over the cultural commodities available in consumer media today—so long, of course, as its organizational protocols and its tokens’ design prevent the rise of the centralized governance via capital that enables social engineering through the media in the production of cultural austerity.
The DAO structure, then, offers a potential antidote for audience backlash, an inoculation against social engineering in the arts and entertainment, and a treatment for the cultural austerity imposed through the media.
Certainly the mainstream corporate media plays a principal role in perpetuating cultural austerity, under which expressions, entertainment, and communication platforms are deliberately manipulated, either by systemic forces or with intent, to shape public perceptions, values, and behaviors to perpetuate society’s existing power structures. This process often leads to the masking of larger social and economic issues, and to the discouragement of working-class solidarity—until, of course, it erupts in events like the 2023 Hollywood strikes, when cultural austerity can no longer mask the divisions exacerbated with innovations like AI technology.
While the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strive to ensure that AI-generated content doesn't undermine the creative contributions of human workers and that their rights are protected in the face of technological advancements, their strikes’ significance extends beyond individual industry concerns, and reflect the broader challenges faced by the professional-managerial class. With technological innovations impacting traditional forms of distribution and production—particularly in the era of streaming and AI—these unions’ demands for fair treatment and compensation for their creative work highlights the need to address the changes imposed by the digital economy on our contemporary media landscape.
Efforts to combat the cultural austerity (which promotes the conditions that produce the need for labor actions) could incorporate innovative approaches, such as the potential incorporation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and tokenized securities, or other mechanisms of empowering creators and audiences to participate in decision-making processes and share in the economic value generated by cultural products. By leveraging blockchain technology and decentralized governance, such approaches could offer a more democratic and transparent way of managing corporate operations, overseeing editorial direction, and promoting fair compensation for creative contributions. While challenges obviously persist, emerging models like DAOs and tokenized securities may hold some promise in providing the technical infrastructure for creating a more equitable arts and entertainment industry, and even in fostering a collaborative relationship between creators and their audiences that counters the effects of cultural austerity in the digital age.
Almost, but not quite. Yes we do need more communication between the populist left and right, but traditionalism isn't as bad as you portray it, but simply a desire for a stable social framework for people to thrive within. What the right gets wrong though is that capitalism destroys that order, not serves it. A true beyond left and right social order would revive maker and merchant guilds, and put strict limits on the size of organizations. It would train all people in a meaningful career, set a fixed fair price for goods and services, and demand excellence and service from all people in the context of locally regulated non capital intensive market that has no usury lending, and easy access to the goods and education necessary to start small enterprises and voluntary cooperatives.