I’m still officially on break from this blog, but I wanted to share an important, thorough post from one of my favorite business observers these days, Matt Stoller. His Substack publication BIG tracks the ongoing perils of American monopoly and current anti-monopolistic actions. His most recent piece is a masterful summary of the Hollywood writers’ strike in its larger historical, legal, and economic contexts, and it backs up my twenty+ year personal diatribe against Wall Street for ruining every culture business I’ve ever loved—recorded and live music, movies, newspapers, periodicals, books. When you reduce cultural production and original storytelling to just another labor cost—when you use digital oligarchy and algorithmic nonsense to boost profits in the short term but eliminate the market signals that connect people who love or hate specific art things from the people who make specific art things—you rip the value out of the entire enterprise. That’s just my cranky gloss on the problem of unchecked media consolidation. Read Stoller to understand what’s really at stake in this strike: the possibility of a vibrant, expansive, diverse visual storytelling enterprise, one that helps explain us to ourselves—or at least gets us to laugh and cry about lives other than our own.
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