I get the sense that at least some degree of this fashion reporting has to do with the business world hoping to cash in on the next trend and/or or avoid becoming yesterday's news, so they turn to these guys in the same way that investors turn to stock market gurus for predictions. One such crystal ball Business Insider seems obsessed with as of late is the whole "Gen–this," "Gen–that" thing, producing a slew of articles over the past couple of months with titles like:
"I'm a millennial who manages Gen Z workers. The hardest thing about it is dealing with all their 'feelings about work,'"
and:
"Meet Gen Zalpha, the powerful combo generation of teens and 20-somethings who are about to have major spending power." 

Now maybe there's plenty to this. I dunno. It's just funny to me. Gen Zalpha. Is that like the reset of the Mayan calendar? 

"Wear what you dig."
 

Rather than start a thread dedicated to the ongoing writer's strike, I'll just put this here, a good explainer vid that's gone viral this week with Adam Ruins Everything calling out the CNN boss (CEO of Warner/Discovery) for saying that they can't afford to pay writers while personaly pocketing $250 million dollars last year.  That's $250 million dollars for one man over one year.



 

This all relates to my similar hate of Canadian douche faced staple Galen Weston. After having inherited a huge family fortune from his grocery magnate father, he has tried to play every man in his commercials for years. Like all of these billionaires, he only substantially increased his wealth during the pandemic, but didn't hesitate to jack up all his prices under the ruse of supply chain demand. He had to do it, he tried to explain in a recent ad. The last few years have been hard on everybody, and to prove his allegiance to the worjing class family, agreed to freeze the prices of his lowest quality shit, after he had just jacked them up considerably higher than his worst products had ever been. So, still making gross profit while trying to maintain a guise of empathetic everyman.

Thankfully, most people saw through this and the hostility he received towards his condescension in pretending to understand struggle, was a mild corrective.

But this is still the guy who immediately cut the salaries of all his low tier employees as soon as rhe pandemic was over, while giving himself a raise on top of his next level profits (because, job well done Galen)

These people need to be destroyed

I would also like to address this "mini-room abuse".  Sounds fraught.  Let's get to the bottom of that.

Rock wrote:

I think this article explains it: https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/writers-guild-contract-negotiation-mini-room-1235568173/

So it's a way to keep writers' pay at scale.

I've seen some attempts to criticize the WGA by saying that a lot of these new shows, whether on networks or streaming, simply aren't very good anyway so why should these writers deserve more money?  But the double edge there is that maybe these recent shows are not very good precisely because of these newer forms of utilizing writers.  If this trend towards mini-rooms has been keeping pay at scale, then you get what you pay for.

This recent SNL sketch is pretty good.  Some say the joke is the oversaturation of content, but I think it's more about the quality of recent content.  (In any event, the SNL writing continues to generally be atrocious though.)



 

I think the "I don't believe in quality" quote strikes at the heart of the matter.  These kinds of disputes tend to be framed as 'art vs. commerce', the creatives vs. the business people.  But the heart of the conflict is really quality vs. quantity.  Quantitative minds have a distrust for anything that can't be accounted via predictable calculation.  Entertainment, for them, is a numbers game - box office, ratings, ticket receipts, eyeballs, likes and subscribes.  To them, there is no discernable difference between the Star Wars films.  Star Wars is an identifiable property that has a built-in (predictable) rate of return.  (Would anyone be surprised if we found out that the last Star Wars trilogy was written by A.I.?)  For them, there's confusion why Justice League bombed.  (It had Batman on the poster!!!)  It's worth remembering that the two foundations of the modern blockbuster - Jaws and Star Wars (the Remus and Romulus, so to speak) - were distrusted by the studios that produced them to be anything more than B-movie entertainment, modestly budgeted movies that, at the very least, could always make their profit at the drive-ins if all else fails.  The studios penny-pinched both films, questioned the necessity of key creative decisions, shook their heads in pity at these young directors with their naive heads in the clouds.  Does the shark even work yet?  A walking dog?  There was no proven algorithmic path to success for either project.  Until there was.  And now, in their wake, their success is taken for granted as formula.  The studios didn't then realize the potential in investing in young filmmakers with new bold ideas, they simply demanded the next Jaws, the next Star Wars.  That Barton Fink feeling.  The studio people don't understand why Jaws is so much better than The Last Shark, only that Jaws  made a lot more money.  They didn't green-light the sequels because they failed to understand how dumb they were, they just didn't believe that it made any difference.  Studios don't create formulas, they simply follow them.

And A.I. doesn't create formulas either, only regurgitating mutations of its inputs.  Only someone who doesn't believe (place trust) in "quality" could possibly fail to understand the drain of diminishing returns that this kind of regurgitation foretells.  The studios have been hinting at this for several years now, justifying their endless reboots by saying that "there's only so many stories, and they've all already been told".  That's just another way of saying that they're less willing to invest in new creative ideas.


Technology, by definition, is a tool, to be utilized to aid in human endeavor.  Some A.I. is especially valuable as an analytic tool.  Spell-check and search engines are essentially A.I. programs.  Technology is supposed to help people, not replace them.  A.I. researcher Ben Goertzel had a troubling prediction that A.I. could replace 80% of all jobs.  The problem with that is not only Goertzel's enthusiasm at the prospect, but in the complete indifference to finding new ways to employ this 80% of the current workforce.  "People can find better things to do with their life than work for a living."  Oh?  And how will they afford to do all of these better things?  Because unless you're also proposing a more utopian overthrow of our entire economy (and best of luck), I don't think most people will find abject poverty as a better thing to do with their lives.  And, btw, Goertzel is a cognitive scientist who happens to be the CEO of an A.I. research laboratory, so he apparently enjoys working for a living.  This proposal of selling his product as a means of improving your life ("no more work!!!") is as much a bluff as the so-called "gig economy".  This is another example of how the rich are looking to off-load the bottom-feeding 80% of the population.  ("You'll all be better off!")  More wisdom from Douglas Rushkoff.
 

Last edited by Jinnistan (5/13/2023 9:55 pm)

[img]https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/AP23200723153436-e1689800243851.jpg?resize=876,492[/img]


A day after the WGA and SAG filed a joint lawsuit against NBCUniversal for taking certain illegal steps to hinder the picketing lines outside of their studio, the protesters discovered the above, which is where NBCUniversal decided to shave to the stump all of the trees lining the street outside the studio which had been providing shade for the picket line.  It all looks terribly necessary, doesn't it?

NBCUniversal is claiming that this was simply standard scheduled maintainance that just happened to coincide with the strike.  Which makes sense, because if you do have to completely eliminate shady tree foliage from time to time, you obviously should schedule it for the middle of July during a record-breaking heat wave in Southern California. 

In February, those tree-trimmers would have had to wear shirts or something.

The LA City Comptroller has pointed out that these trees are, in fact, city property and that no permits for scheduled trimming have been issued this year, shortly before announcing an investigation into NBCUniversal.
 

It's now fairly clear that "Barbieheimmer" was entirely a marketing gimmick intended to compensate for the lack of in-person publicity caused by the SAG strike.  It's also pretty clear (although without seeing it yet) that the satire in Barbie is only, at best, half sincere, and that most ultimately all of the sociocultural commentary was simply window-dressing to cover up a typical, and typically cynical, brand-fetish testament to consumerism.  The fact that the studio has now announced a slate of new movies to flesh out a "Mattel shared universe" leaves that verdict not at all ambiguous.  In short, like it or not, it's exactly the kind of film that the studios want to justify the current IP-fueled strategy that has made these strikes inevitable in the first place.

But still, I'm happy to see the other IP-dependent films in its wake - Haunted Mansion, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Blue Beetle, Meg 2, Equalizer 3 - go down in flames.  In effect, we can consider this year's summer blockbuster season over and done with.  Bootlickers over at AV Club have a new headline "Why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Will Always Be Relevant".  They can't possibly be getting paid enough to have so little shame and self-respect.
 

I trust Gerwig's intentions were pure, but it's hard to ignore the context of the particular moment.