So what’s really going on? And how did we get here?įirst, we need to understand why the 2010s may well come to be remembered as the great decade of magical thinking for Silicon Valley.

Yet Iger reportedly makes $27 million a year, while Netflix just raked in $1.5 billion in net profit in the last quarter. We’ve heard Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger saying the demand by the Screen Actors Guild for fair payment in the new digital landscape “isn’t realistic,” and heard how Netflix saw declining user sign-ups and stock prices last year. But just as it did when it was issuing from the tech sector during the 2010s, this talk too often amounts to a smokescreen that lets executives and investors line their pockets and risks leaving workers holding the bag. Studio heads are touting the disruptive properties of digital streaming, the transformative power of AI, a brave, unpredictable new world for entertainment writ large - and how writers and actors must adapt to this new future.

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. Yet the reason this battle is shaping up to be so uniquely intractable and momentous - as you might have gathered from all the headlines about artificial intelligence and streaming economics - is very much of our moment.īut it’s not, ultimately, technology that’s at the root of the problem. 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: one of workers fighting bosses for better pay.

Fantastical thinking