People are having quite an apocalyptic summer. Wildfire smoke chokes the air of major cities. Amid a brutal heat wave, striking workers muster picket lines on scorching streets. The screenwriters of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have been on strike for three months. Last week they were joined by 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the actors’ union. Hollywood is closed for business. Everyone is scared that artificial intelligence could steal their jobs. It is hot. Tempers are short. The whole entertainment industry is out of work, angry and ready to lean into class war. It feels a little scary. It feels a little giddy. It feels like anything might happen this year.
This is good. If there was not a huge fight happening right now, the implications would be much, much worse.
It can be tempting to demonize Hollywood as the source of society’s ills. The right hates them for being decadent limousine liberals undermining traditional values; the left hates them for being decadent limousine liberals spreading the US’ pernicious capitalist myths worldwide.
Illustration: Tania Chou
However, what is happening should be understood as Hollywood’s redemption.
The thousands of workers engaged in this enormous, multi-union Hollywood strike — something not seen in the US since 1960 — represent two battles that matter to every American. People might not naturally pick “writers and actors” to be the backbone of their national defense force, but hey, people go to war with the army they have. In this case, they are well suited to the fight at hand.
The first battle is between humanity and artificial intelligence. Just a year ago, it seemed like a remote issue, a vague and futuristic possibility, still tinged with a touch of sci-fi. Now, AI has advanced so fast that everyone has grasped that it could be to white-collar and creative work what industrial automation was to factory work. It is the sort of technology that is either put in a box, or it puts people in a box. And who is going to build the guardrails that prevent the worst abuses of AI?
Look around. Do people believe that the divided US government would rouse itself to concerted action in time to regulate this technology, which grows more potent by the month? It would not. Do people know, then, the only institutions with the power to enact binding rules about AI that protect working people from being destroyed by a bunch of impenetrable algorithms that can produce stilted, error-filled simulacra of their work at a fraction of the cost?
Unions. When it comes to regulating AI, before it gets so widely entrenched that it is impossible to roll back, union contracts are the only game in town. And the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts, which cover entire industries, would go down in history as some of the first major efforts to write reasonable rules governing this technology that is so new that even knowing what to ask for involves a lot of speculation.
What is known for sure is this: If people leave AI wholly in the hands of tech companies and their investors, it is certain that AI would be used in a way that takes the maximum amount of money out of the pockets of labor and deposits it in the accounts of executives and investment firms. These strikes are happening, in large part, to set the precedent that AI must benefit everyone rather than being a terrifying inequality accelerator that throws millions out of work to enrich a lucky few. Even if people have never been to Hollywood, they have a stake in this fight. AI would come for their own industry soon enough.
That brings us to the second underlying battle here: the class war itself. When people scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions negotiate with earn hundreds of millions of dollars, while most SAG-AFRA members do not make the US$26,000 a year needed to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.
In this sense, the entertainment industry is just like every other industry operating under the US’ rather gruff version of capitalism. If left to their own devices, companies would always try to push labor costs towards zero and executive pay towards infinity. The preferred state of every corporation in the US is one in which its employees earn just enough money to survive, and the CEO and investors earn enough money to build private rockets to escape to a private Mars colony for billionaires. The only — the only — thing that stops this process is labor power. That comes from unions. The walls that unions build protect not just their own members, but by extension the entire working class. That is what is at stake here.
So people should not make the mistake of seeing these strikes as something remote from the realities of their own life. Hollywood has many flaws, but its most redeeming quality is that it is a strongly unionized industry.
Unlike in most places, its workers can fight back against abuse, whether it comes from AI’s dead-hearted algorithms or from Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s stupid rich smug face. The strikers in the streets are assuming the responsibility of drawing a line in the sand, saying that the excesses of inequality must stop here and now.
Whatever they win, it would help everyone. And they will win. Bet on it. Go out to a picket line and you would believe me. They will win because they are truly pissed; they will win because they are willing to suffer for what is necessary; and, most of all, they will win because Hollywood executives cannot act or write.
All those executives can do is sell what the actors and the writers make and steal as much of the profit as they can grab, but when the work stops, there is nothing to sell. There are no profits. And while everyone on the picket line finds love, community and purpose, the executives would find nothing but empty theaters and public scorn. Soon, nobody would remember why they got paid so much money in the first place.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York City and a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.
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