“The eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us.”
So said Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union of around 160,000 film and television actors, journalists, radio personalities, recording artists, singers, voice actors, internet influencers, fashion models, and others, that is now on strike, joining the writers’ guild that has been striking since May.
This is something to remember in the coming weeks and months, as these strikes play out. As Hamilton Nolan points out in his newsletter, after referring to Amazon workers and the WGA strike: “If you consider, on the one hand, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and on the other hand, a struggling Amazon warehouse worker in Staten Island, you might assume that the two had few common interests. Wrong. From the perspective of a $1.36 trillion company, both the screenwriter and the warehouse worker are just tiny inputs to be controlled. They are each a small mouse trying to chew their way through a redwood tree.”
It is reassuring to know that Drescher and other union leaders seem to be very aware that the very public nature of their industries and these strikes means that they receive a wildly disproportionate amount of media coverage as compared to any other strike or union action, and so there is a great responsibility here that they seem to take seriously.
The implications of artificial intelligence on jobs is the obvious, and pivotal, case in point. As told by SAG-AFTRA director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, “They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan ... to be able to use it for the rest of eternity.” In other words, the dream for the AMPTP (the organization representing the studios and the streaming companies) is a future without a real labour force at all — your likeness is scanned once, you are paid for the scan, and they can do whatever they want with your image in perpetuity. If Hollywood is able to use technology to basically eliminate a human workforce and its attendant pesky rights, we can and should expect the same thing to happen to many other industries, creative or otherwise.
Paris Marx, as usual, sums it up well: “The core issue here is not just how corporate power is fighting to disempower labor, but how it’s using new technologies to do it: visual effects to replace physical work, streaming services to upend the business model, and AI to further deskill the work of writers and performers.”
Hollywood is in a prime position to challenge this state of affairs, because so often corporations are able to make these changes unchallenged, and they are made to seem inevitable to the rest of us. It’s worth putting it as crudely and simply as possible: it will be harder for you or I to stomach the encroachment of artificial intelligence or other technologies into our jobs and workplaces if we collectively watch hundreds of thousands of workers in Hollywood refuse to let it happen to them. Not to get too sentimental about it, but this is at the core of solidarity movements, seeing that we do, in fact, have something in common with Fran Drescher, and also with the thousands of background actors struggling to make ends meet, and so on.
It’s worth repeating, as I often do, that the problem is very rarely, if ever, the technology itself. In fact, while critiques of AI and other technologies as such are useful, but there are much larger questions about the structures it all exists under that are of far more importance. Obviously I’m talking about capitalism, but it helps to clarify for us that the fight here isn’t actually about artificial intelligence, it’s about corporate power over how it and other technologies are wielded, and who stands to benefit from that. As it stands right now, it’s not you or I or most of those in SAG-AFTRA and WGA. That’s the fight.
Threads!
The people have been absolutely desperate for my take on Meta’s new Twitter clone, Threads, and I do have a few quick thoughts on it. It is, apparently, the fastest-growing app in history, hitting 100 million users in about one week. This is an achievement, sure, but it’s also a reflection of existing user lock-in: if you’re already on Instagram, then it becomes incredibly easy to open up Threads, even just out of a sick curiosity, and maybe never post or open it up again at all. It is also a matter of skillful timing, coming at a point of pathetic leadership from Elon Musk over Twitter, and as would-be competitor Bluesky continues to drift into relative beta-version obscurity.
The bigger story here is that, so far, there is no story. Threads has not produced a single post or meme or story that has broken out of its own platform in any significant way. The only exposure to Threads most people have on the rest of the internet to this point is people making fun of all the brands talking to each other like it’s 2014 Twitter. But even the constant comparisons to Twitter, while inevitable, kind of miss the point, at least from Meta’s perspective. As John Herrman writes: “For many of its early adopters, it seems to be functioning like, well, an Instagram for text. Nothing about this has much to do with Twitter...Instead, it’s a slightly new strategy from the Facebook playbook, an attempt to return to products that have worked before, and a hope that it may be possible to turn back the clock to a time when Meta’s products felt new and, for the company and its customers, full of potential.” It’s a momentary jolt, and it’s far from guaranteed that it will last.
As I’ve intimated before, we should not feel satisfied by new wannabe online public squares that simply reassert the status quo values of the digital economy and are provided to us by the same recipients of its original glory. Whether it’s Bluesky, from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, or Threads, from Mark effing Zuckerberg, we should demand alternatives that are not beholden to these corporate logics that seek the same growth as ever according to the hoarding of power by these titans of the industry. That seems like common sense to me, but even tech critics I have a lot of respect for seem pretty willing to entertain themselves within these branded playgrounds of further social alienation and emergent monetization schemes that continue to erase anything resembling actual sociality.
Ephemera
More great reporting on the humans behind AI, this time from Rest of World.
The Orange is the New Black cast spoke to The New Yorker about how the streaming economy short-shrifts actors: “She added, referring to her residuals, “I get twenty dollars! I would love to know: How much money did Ted make last year?” (Twenty-two million in salary, plus stock options.)”
The Drift essay taking down Jack Antonoff’s whole thing. Then there’s this.
For Vox, Sara Morrison explains how TikTok solves our decision fatigue: “It’s been decades since internet access was introduced to the mass market, and the novelty of endless choice has worn off. There’s something to be said for having something or someone else pick what you see and do. Which is how things used to work before the internet, of course, just not with the granularity that’s possible now.”
Of course Stanford remains a breeding ground for wealthy freaks to brainwash students about AI apocalypses and effective altruism, as reported in The Washington Post.
Song Recommendation: “Summer Glass” — Julie Byrne