Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 344 points – Column: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley's magical thinking
latimes.com

Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking::Inspired by the success of Netflix, Hollywood studios pursued Silicon Valley-style hypergrowth with tactics borrowed from the likes of Uber and Lyft.

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I don't agree with this piece. Labor exploitation has been a thing for much longer than silicon valley, as well as wall street. Modern ceos are applying old strategies. They are managing to do it more effectively now than in the recent past because governments are weaker and international competition stronger

I don't think the article is trying to claim that labor exploitation is new.

This part directly admits that it is a very old phenomenon:

It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.

As I understood it, the article just wants to explain why this is happening now, because historically it seems to happen in waves.

The reason I don't agree is that the article overlooks that old school execs have found in the silicon valley the gold rush.

A place where engineers are the miners that have allowed them to make tons of money easily, by simple, old school, well established, amoral business tactics. Their preaching poisoned the silicon valley. Mckinsey type of execs and exec consultants raveged the silicon valley's tech companies as soon as the big money started flowing in, burning everything in the meantime. For the movie industry, the newest wave of "technological exploitation" took longer because they are historically a very conservative, well established industry led by tech illiterates.

The next industry will be automotive. Which is one of the most corrupted and amoral industry out there, even without modern tech. Now that old school automotive execs are learning how to turn on a computer, the new wave of tech based exploitation will start there (and it is already starting)

Hilarious timing, considering that the only reason tech was able to act like that was thanks to excessively dovish monetary policy in the wake of 08... Which has now come full circle.

Hollywood is going to crash and burn because they think AI is free creative labor. But an exec can be replaced by AI much more ably than a creator already. Truly good creative AI is still not here. Not for what they'd need.

Haha so true. Ai can work with numbers better than emotions.

"ChatGPT, read this SEC filing and these quarterly reports. Suggest high level areas for improving shareholder value and the performance of the business as a whole as an agenda for the next board meeting. Issue a statement to the investors. Then golf and do cocaine for three months."

CEOs r fuk

Its not even funny how true this statement is. ChatGPT could easily replace every managing partner at my company and the business would have all the more money to reinvest into itself without them pocketing all the profit.

ChatGPT is actually very bad with numbers or following a step-by-step process. It just says things that sound correct. It doesn't know what's going on.

So it can only replace the bad executives who sound like they know what they're doing. It literally can't add 2 + 2.

ChatGPT is an LLM tuned to emulate how a human would generate text.

I would imagine that a different type of AI would be used if they wanted it to work with numbers.

Found this odd, anyone smarter than me care to offer opinions on why they wrote it this way?

"Yet Iger reportedly makes $27 million a year, while Netflix just raked in $1.5 billion in net profit in the last quarter."

Why are they comparing a person to a company?

Shouldnt it be disney(3.19B last year) to netflix(1.5B last quarter), or Iger(27 million) to Reedings/Sarandos(35 mill each as co ceos)

*The numbers i used are from a quick google search where they arent taken from the article, please be kind if i found the wrong ones. I dont actually care about the numbers was just trying to match what the article did. Feel free to correct them for everyone elses benefit

I see it more as Disney's CEO saying his company can't afford to pay actors more, and yet they chose to pay him 27mil a year. That's why his salary is relevant in the discussion.

Would we even miss something if Hollywood is gone?

All the committee-made cookie cutter blockbusters we're all sick of hearing about will be gone.

All the indie movies with genuine heart and passion in them that no one has ever heard of because they don't have the marketing budget will be fine.

What about the genuinely well-crafted big budget films? Are we ready to toss those out as well? Movies like The Dark Knight, Avengers: Infinity War, John Wick 4, and now Barbie and Oppenheimer are as much a product of the Hollywood blockbuster system as the cookie-cutters. I don't think Hollywood and passion are mutually exclusive.

I hope so, but I'll believe it when I see it. Can't say I'm very optimistic given the history of copycatting in Hollywood (and basically every other creative industry)

Are we pretending the majority of the population doesn't derive massive enjoyment from Hollywood productions? Is that the play here?

We are rather observing we're poorly representative of the majority of the population. And that's a good thing.

I mean yea kinda... They provide virtually all the mass entertainment for people all over the world.

Nothing of value will be lost if Hollywood disappears.

Disagree. But it should remain dead as long as these shenanigans remain