Studio executives embraced Silicon Valley's magical thinking of hypergrowth and disruption for the past 10 years, only to slash worker pay as the boom times end
In one respect, the actors and writers of Hollywood uniting on the picket lines in a historic, industry-shaking strike is a tale as old as time …
This story places the actors’ and writers’ unified action in that broader arc: a growth-first studio strategy is colliding with the compensation model used to support the people making its programming.
First-order effects
Actors and writers gain a shared bargaining front against studios as pay cuts and disrupted residual models become central labor issues.
Studios face immediate production disruption and heightened pressure to resolve compensation terms with the creative workforce.
Second-order effects
Streaming-led studios must reconcile growth-oriented cost structures with the need to retain writers and performers, making labor terms a more direct constraint on content budgets.
The dispute broadens scrutiny of how studios deploy AI: a failed negotiation over pay and AI has made technology governance part of the labor bargain rather than a separate operational decision.
Third-order effects
If the pattern persists, Hollywood’s streaming transition will be judged less by subscriber-scale ambitions than by whether its revenue model can sustain residuals and career stability for creative labor.
Labor agreements could become a key mechanism for setting the acceptable commercial use of AI in entertainment, rather than leaving those boundaries solely to studios and technology providers.
The trend: Hollywood is moving from a streaming-era hypergrowth playbook toward a harder negotiation over who bears the costs and captures the value of digital distribution and AI-enabled production.
💯 Studios could have focused on producing film and TV to sell to tech companies like Netflix to fill their libraries. — Instead they decided to compete with Netflix and launch their own streaming services, and became unwitting tech companies. — Turns out running a tech compan…
@tob @carnage4life — Were the studios really not being adequately compensated for the material on Netflix? Or was it that no one can resist squeezing every last bit of blood from a stone? It seems there are so many streaming services now that it is difficult to have enough ma…
LA Times: — Silicon Valley's invasion of Hollywood brought with it science fictional notions of growth for the industry, a penchant for secrecy and unaccountability and the expectation that it could get away with treating workers like robots or invisible code. …
“It's a sticking point in negotiations—#actors & #writers on streaming series want a better way to calculate the value of work, given the residuals they earn are so much lower than for network or cable... ‘The reason nobody wants to open the books is because if Wall Street got a …
Becoming clear that Netflix has no intention of meeting any demands nor opening their cooked books. Both would ruin them. Suspect it's going to be about getting every non-Netflix studio to peel off and cut deals. #wgastrike #wgastrong #sagaftrastrong
“It's not, ultimately, technology that's at the root of the problem. It's that the studio executives both new and old have embraced the powerful — and ultimately disastrous — magical thinking pumped out by Silicon Valley for the last 10 years.” https://www.latimes.com/...
“As with the biggest companies of Silicon Valley's magical thinking era, it's often hard to parse whether the ones touting the game-changing technologies themselves even believe in these visions” https://www.latimes.com/...
It's not “technology that's at the root of the problem. It's that the studio executives both new and old have embraced the powerful—and ultimately disastrous—magical thinking pumped out by Silicon Valley for the last 10 years.” Must read from @bcmerchant! https://www.latimes.com/…
Excellent points here. One is data secrecy. Another, how Silicon Valley execs get rich while screwing the workforce. I started covering “high tech” in the 80s. Grove, Gates, Jobs. Great promise! Now, road to dystopia. https://www.latimes.com/...
Excellent work by Brian threading the needle & offering a concise history of how Hollywood became Silicon Valleyfied https://www.latimes.com/... [image]
A big reason Hollywood is coming apart right now is that executives fell for Silicon Valley's magical thinking — and just like so many tech co's that fail to deliver on promises of endless growth, they're taking it out on workers https://www.latimes.com/...
This is a really solid overview of how Silicon Valley's economics are fake and other industries like Hollywood have really fucked themselves up trying to copy them when they actually do things that aren't fake https://www.latimes.com/...
I've been thinking and discussing this with peers for a long while. It seemed like at some point the entertainment industry forgot themselves and tried their best to become a tech company, without realizing the alarming risks involved... https://www.latimes.com/...
This is a huge bullseye of an article and exactly why our strikes are not just about us but about all labor. What they are trying to do to us with A.I. and freelance status they will / are doing to healthcare, education, and transportation & more.