Connecting the Dots: Entertainment and Technology
“If you just ignore me I expect I shall probably go away.” – Marvin, the permanently miserable robot from the Douglas Adams classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Somehow it seems that the world of entertainment thinks that the above advice applies to emerging distribution methods that take advantage of the internet. No matter how many times they learn their lesson the hard way, the entertainment industry continues to screw itself.
As I write this, millions of dollars circle the drain as countless film and television projects are shuttered. Below the line crew, everyone from the boom operator to the guy who delivers scripts and checks to fancy offices, are being laid off and sent home with little hope of paying the bills. Just beyond the horizon, ad revenues threaten to evaporate as hit shows won’t be around to attract viewers to their TV screens. Hollywood today faces a work stoppage of staggering proportions. The ’88 strike was estimated to cost in excess of $500 million, and the entertainment pie was much smaller 20 years ago. There are a lot of people in a lot of pain. But it has to happen.
We’re here because once again the suits decided that if they just ignored it long enough, technology would cease to vex them. The over-arching theme of the WGA strike concerns compensation for work distributed online and through DVD.
Let’s review: entertainment reaches a crossroads with technology. Entertainment closes their eyes and prays they don’t need to act. Entertainment gets screwed.
I confess that the simmering core of iconoclasm lurking within me delights at seeing this pattern repeated with such regularity. This time, though, there’s more than just a light trimming off of some prick record executive’s expense account. This time we’re seeing real, honest, hard-working guys losing their shirts because of politics that happen well outside their world.
Creative destruction at its finest, I suppose. The bright side of this is that as more of this industry crumbles, the organizations that fall out of the other end will be smarter, leaner, better and brighter than any of the lumbering dinosaurs that plague us today. The democratization of idea distribution heralded by the internet and associated technologies is going to be the most liberating advent since the invention of the printing press. As billions of dollars in wasted budgets for crappy movies and failed TV shows have proven, a bunch of isolated, fat, old men don’t have any business deciding what makes you and I smile. They have no competence to determine what will make us laugh and cry. They are out of their depth to predict what will inspire us.
My rhetoric may sound more idealistic than I am usually wont to indulge, but make no mistake: my intentions are capitalist. Exploding artificial barriers to entry gives us a more stable, vibrant and diverse market. Cutting the head off this doddering old snake means many more people can get an audience and get paid. The idea marketplace should be a meritocracy, not a race to see who can bottle up the most exclusive resources and use them to turn out garbage.
Change is always born in pain. If it means humanity can avoid another Stealth (2005), that’s got to be worth something.