The Culture Journalist

Since May 2, the Writers Guild of America has been on strike, shutting down film sets across the country and demanding a fair shake in the face of a changing Hollywood landscape that, if we’re being honest, looks a lot like the one that we’re dealing with over here in the media industry. Hint: It has a lot to do with the ways that some of the world’s biggest tech companies — including Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon — have transformed what it looks like to make a living as a film or tv writer. With issues like shrinking residuals — or payments writers receive when their work is re-aired  — increased job insecurity, and the looming threat of automation and AI, it’s a story that brings together many of the issues we touch on this show. So we brought on two key players from the front lines to give us a candid peek into what life as a screenwriter in 2023 actually looks like: Mason Flink, a TV writer and WGA Guild Captain based in LA who has worked on shows like Minx, Special, and Love, and Sara David, a former colleague of ours from VICE who has worked at Netflix and Paramount+, and who is now the VP of online Media for the WGA East. Mason and Sara tell us about how Hollywood labor conditions directly impact the quality of the film and television we consume (and who gets to produce it), the long history of deregulation and financialization that set the stage for this moment, and why this fight has big consequences for creative workers of all stripes — not just in the writers’ room.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Spring is here and the outside world is beckoning. So we’re taking a break from talking about evil billionaires, digital surveillance, and shadowy financial instruments to bring you a special conversation with boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who just published a book called How Golf Can Save Your Life.If that sounds pretty far afield from our usual programming, it’s not: Inspired by his experiences returning to the sport after a stint in 2010s media left him with a nasty case of depression and burnout, it’s a book-length celebration of the idea that the best way to resist the worst aspects of modern society is to get to get off the internet, spend time more outdoors, and learn how to be a better human, not just when it comes to other people but also to yourself.Emilie and Drew just got back from a golf-themed book release party they organized last week in Brooklyn, so we thought we’d bring Drew on to talk about why it seems like golf is suddenly everywhere in contemporary culture, from NYC menswear to DJ Khaled’s IG; the sport’s working-class origins; and how the book doubles as a critique of the state of digital and algorithmic media.Buy How Golf Can Save Your Life from Bookshop.org.Check out Drew’s work on SubstackSubscribe to Nersey, a podcast Drew just started with some former coworkers (ahem) from a certain defunct music website (ahem). They say it’s “sort of about music.”Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comNote: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, reply to this email and we will send you this episode for free.Between the layoffs at Buzzfeed and Insider, VICE reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy, and Elon’s multi-front war against public media and independent journalists, the past two weeks have definitely felt like a “sky …

How did tech giants like Spotify and Meta and TikTok get so good at separating us creative workers from the value we generate with our work? According to a fascinating new book by Melbourne Law school professor Rebecca Giblin and journalist, science-fiction author, and activist Cory Doctorow, the answer lies in something called “chokepoint capitalism”: the phenomenon whereby platforms insert themselves between cultural producers and consumers and charge creators money — either explicitly or implicitly — to reach their own fans.In other words, if you’re a creator, all your fans are on a platform, you can’t leave without losing access to your audiences, their wallets, and critical gates for exposure; most of the time, that means you just have to take the raw deal you’re being handed, ethics or the ability for you to eke out a living from your work be damned.Cory, who also wrote a fascinating article earlier this year about the “enshittification” of TikTok, is one of our favorite critics of the contemporary internet. We invited him onto the show to discuss how chokepoints became so acute in the creative industries (hint: it’s something that fusty legacy institutions like the major labels, radio companies, and Hollywood talent agencies have also been doing for years), and how companies leverage factors like network effects, switching costs, weak anti-trust enforcement, and even copyright law itself to rig creative labor markets in their favor.While these platforms feel impossible to leave, there’s still something we can do about it. Cory also tells us about some of the tactics creative workers can use to dismantle these chokeholds and get paid, and where the current tech downturn (and Silicon Valley Bank) fits in with all this. if there’s such a thing as a quintessential Culture Journalist conversation, we think this episode is it.Purchase Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them BackSupport our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn the hours before Silicon Valley Bank imploded last week, setting off a chain of events that would send the entire tech (and finance) world into an existential tailspin, Andrea and Emilie made the somewhat excruciating decision to watch Spotify’s annual business presentation, “Stream On” — all hour and a half of it. Between the company’s new, Tiktok-inspired interface, its Black Mirror-esque personal AI DJ tool, and the expansion of its Discovery Mode program offering artists more exposure in exchange for a lower royalty rate, the event offered plenty of food for thought about the state of cultural curation — and musical gatekeeping — in 2023.Should we believe tech companies when they say they are democratizing cultural creation and distribution — or is all that utopian language just a smoke screen for the ways they are slowly rendering human curators (like DJs, record store clerks, A&Rs, and music critics) obsolete? How did the figure of the musical “gatekeeper” get such a bad rap in the first place? And is it time, as musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) suggests in an excellent new essay for Dada Drummer, for us to consider them in a new light?

Just a little over a year ago, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation — a trend of workers across multiple different sectors resigning from their jobs. But amid rising interest rates, inflation, stagnating wages, and layoffs in… uh…certain industries we may or may not be intimately familiar with, we seem to have entered an entirely new chapter in the history of work. It’s not just that things feel, ahem, a bit more uncertain than they used to; for many of us, the entire experience of work feels different too, with the rise of hybrid and remote employment introducing all sorts of new challenges around office etiquette, boundaries, and the-ever elusive “work-life balance.” We brought on UK-based business, tech, and culture journalist Anna Codrea-Rado — author of a fantastic book about freelancing, creator of the newsletter A-Mail, and co-host of Is this Working?, our all-time favorite podcast about work — to help us make sense of this strangely chaotic and confusing moment in the post-pandemic work landscape.We discuss how the culture of work has changed since the heady glory days of the r/antiwork subreddit (remember all of those viral news stories about people quitting their jobs via text?); the dystopian surveillance mechanisms and non-stop intrusions on our time that make our experience of remote work so exhausting; and some of the darker realities lurking beneath shiny new labor paradigms like the four-day work week and DAOs. Anna also opens up her own journey with work over the years, and the meta experience of navigating self-employment while writing and podcasting about it for a living.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s episode goes out to the journalists in your life. (Or you, if you happen to be a journalist). According to one estimate, nearly 130,000 workers in tech and media have lost their job over the 12 months — and while we’ve talked about the annual ritual of media layoffs before, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re finally reaching the end of the era of digital media as we know it. Is the current wave of layoffs and closures just more of the same, or a sign that writers and editors need to completely rethink what a career in media even looks like? How do digital publications actually make money — and what lessons can we learn, if any, from these suspiciously concurrent cuts in both tech and media? Lucky for you, we happen to have an old colleague in our Rolodex with an intimate understanding of the economics of the business (and how they got so broken). His name is Ben Dietz, and he’s the creator of an excellent culture and technology newsletter called [SIC] Weekly. Prior to his current gig as chief strategy officer at NTWRK, he spent 16 years working upstairs from us at VICE — leading sales and business development, founding an in-house agency called VIRTUE, and just generally being the kind of ad guy who seemed to genuinely care about the work we did as journalists. Drew joins to help ask questions… and then ask Ben for money.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse? This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS, to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and workers are constantly being asked to do more more with less. Putting on our finance hats, we zero in on something called the leveraged buyout, a shadowy business maneuver from the world of private equity that happens to be the subject of Syzygy, Jacob’s excellent new documentary for DIS’ streaming platform DIS.ART. Mild spoiler: The film was inspired by a supremely strange Meta commercial that aired at the 2022 Super Bowl, and takes us on a surprising and thought-provoking journey involving gaming pioneer Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which acquired the kitschy pizza party chain in 2014 using this very practice.We explore how leveraged buyouts funnel resources away from companies and ordinary Americans and into the coffers of the corporate overclass, DIS’s evolving role as a patron of video work that makes theory accessible to the people, and what it means to successfully adapt to an internet that is always changing for the worse.To watch Syzygy and check out more from the episode, head to theculturejournalist.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever wondered why the Silicon Valley oligarchs seem so obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? In our first episode of 2023, we join media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on an epic journey through the universe of million-dollar bunkers, libertarian island micronations, and hypothetical Mars colonies to explore why they want to get away from us so badly when the apocalypse hits — and what this says about the consequences their business practices and technologies are having on the world right now. As a professor at Queens College and the author of 20 books spanning everything from early cyberculture to alternative currencies, Rushkoff has a knack for putting words to the abstract forces that govern our online lives. In fact, he’s the guy who popularized concepts like “viral media” and “social currency.” In this new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, he turns his attention to something he is calling “the Mindset.” “[It’s] this kind of tech-billionaire belief that with enough money and technology, they can escape the catastrophes that result from their own acquisition of money and use of technology,” he says. “It’s the belief that humanity is a problem that can be solved with technology.”We trace the roots of this worldview back past the “Californian Ideology” of the 90s dot-com bubble to the dawn of interest-backed currencies and the rise of scientism in the era of Francis Bacon; hear a fun story about Timothy Leary and his theory that tech bros are using technology to recreate the experience of the womb; and discuss why letting go of our societal obsession with economic growth may be the only way to resist the Mindset and its extractive impact on labor, communities, and the environment. It’s a hopeful conversation, too — at the end of our time together, Rushkoff discusses what living one’s life in opposition to the technocapitalist status quo might look like.   This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

AI image-generation tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are creating something of a moral panic in the worlds of art, media, and design. And for good reason: Graphic designers and other commercial artists are worried that AI will spur companies to replace human labor with machines while exacerbating the scourge of intellectual property theft that they’ve already been dealing with on the internet for years. A photo director at New York magazine recently penned an essay asking whether DALL-E 2 was going to put her out of a job. Which all raises the question: Is AI the beginning of a more egalitarian artistic future, or the terrifying final stage of a trajectory where corporations and developers find increasingly insidious ways to extract value from the creative class? To begin to make sense of the economic, ethical, and artistic implications of these tools, we brought on the artist, technologist, and Interdependence co-host Mat Dryhurst. You might remember him from our episode last year on NFTs and their implications for the future of independent music. Mat and his partner, the composer Holly Herndon, have been diving headfirst into the possibilities and pitfalls posed by AI for several years now. Most recently, they launched Spawning, an organization building tools by and for artists working with AI. The idea is to give artists greater control over their AI training data by allowing them to opt in or out of these data sets, set permissions on how their style and likeness is used, and even offer their own models to the public. The goal, Mat says, is to establish a standard of consent honored by AI research companies as the tech — whether we like it or not — barrels into the future. Mat joins us from Berlin to give a crash course in the history of text-based image generation and the specific technological developments that led to this moment — from grassroots Discord groups, to Amazon, Microsoft, and Elon Musk-funded behemoths like Open AI, to the nation-states incentivizing this growing research field on the geopolitical stage. We discuss the possibilities and limitations of these tools as a medium for creative expression, the parallels between this moment and the advent of photography, and the changing nature of art, and perceptions of artistic value, in a world where people can create striking images at the push of a button. Finally, we get into the steps we can take now to avoid this becoming a nightmare scenario for artists — or, for the rest of us, the start of an era of really terrible art. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe