My friends and I snuck into Summer Catch and got caught because there were three of us and they hadn’t sold any tickets. They let us purchase tickets instead of kicking us out. (“Free” air conditioning used to be a compelling reason to catch a movie) anyway that’s how I spent September 10th, 2001.
For all of great fair labor practices they fight for, unions obviously also serve as a gatekeeper for those who can work on studio projects and who cannot (not a critque, just stating it). But youtube's pitch to "creators" is that those gates do not exist. So would a youtube labor union only pertain to those who make money through the platform? Or would you want youtube to effectively become another hollywood studio and disallow those with a little league umpire nut shot to upload their clip?
The cop-out answer is that this is something that has to be worked out in the organizing and bargaining process, and would depend a lot on the specific demands of the organized streamers as well as a lot of stuff about YouTube's business model that I'm not sure we know very well. (E.g., how much revenue is derived from random nut-shot videos uploaded by non-partners, and what is the cost associated with hosting them?) But in principle I don't see why the structure couldn't parallel Hollywood's--if you want to partner with YouTube to earn revenue, you (or your employees, for studios that publish to YouTube) need to be in the streamers guild, just as if you want to make movies with the big studios, you need to be in the WGA. Anyone is welcome to upload whatever videos they want for their own purposes, just as I can make movies in my backyard with my friends and release them independently of the major studios and distributors. (I'm singling out YouTube in part because it has such a well-entrenched legal partnership program that "naturally" creates a bargaining unit, versus a place like Instagram where all kinds of influencers rely on the platform without any formal relationship.) My understanding is that YouTube is subject to many of the same power laws as other platforms, where the bulk of views and revenue come from a small fraction of videos, so I suspect it would be advantageous to everyone, not least of all the audience, to let the nut shots continue.
Not a cop-out but a great answer nonetheless...I didn't take into account that the actual dollars on youtube are being made by a small fraction of youtube partnered channels. Your proposed setup could be like prime video - buys/produces union bargained content and also allows people to gloat about their debut feature (or nut shot) being available (to rent) on Priime Video when all they did was upload it.
Then again, most of the nut shots have migrated to Tik Tok anyway (America's Funniest Home Videos --> Youtube --> Tik Tok/Reels).
For more evidence that film and television compete generally with other smartphone-enabled methods of time wasting, see Netflix's persistent (if poorly marketed so far) push into smartphone gaming: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/games
They even have a great content strategy, porting some of the best indie PC/console games of all time to mobile (eg. Hades, Into The Breach, Death’s Door, Kentucky Route Zero)!
this brought back a beautiful teen memory of my friend and i seeing will ferrell's stranger than fiction in theaters, absolutely hating it (idk if i still would today but at the time i thought it was the worst thing i'd ever seen), and in our disappointment deciding to immediately go watch the prestige for the second time that week, which we both considered a cinematic masterpiece (also have not rewatched but i stand by this)
I think it's very astute to single in on the role boredom of the 90s and 00s played in keeping all sorts of media companies thriving, and i think it's correct to zero in on Youtube as competing directly with union organized labor in Hollywood...
But it also still seems too myopic...because it's not just that video is competing against video for hours in our day...it's that podcast audio is completing against video, and streaming music back catalogs are, and random X threads about niche current events, and books, and AI read audio of some NYT Style Section piece, etc. The real issue (as you sorta alluded to) is that Competition for Entertainment options is working TOO well...and if you admit to that, then the only REAL solution is to essentially gate keep some creators out of the market for entertainment (or cull the "algorithm chasing trash")... which, if we are being honest, is exactly what Media conglomerates did for decades by subsidizing Distribution monopolies with Advertising.
While I agree, much of it IS trash,...it's hard to ignore that Trash is what the vast majority of folks crave. And the blatant dismissal of that fact just sort of reminds me of how Media and Hollywood got here...which was taking for granted the reason why *most* people picked up those papers WAS the trash and advertisements...not the Prestige stuff the employees and Social Elite loved to dote on.
Has always bugged me that the inability to take Advertising / Trashes role in cross subsidizing
I genuinely dispute that people "crave" trash, so much as it's what they'll consume if it's convenient, cheap, and easy, and most of our systems are set up to make the worst stuff the easiest to get. People love gossip, true crime, sentimental glurge, it's true, but they also love novelty, ambition, and challenges, in the right contexts. To me the long-term (very long-term) solution isn't to reintroduce elite gatekeepers at the top, but to socialize and democratize the entertainment, publishing, newsmedia, etc. industries entirely, reorienting them away from bottom-line profit-chasing.
The only additional (and personal) context I will add is...my wife goes to GREAT lengths to steal her parents cable login info (among others!) just to watch every minute of Real Housewives content BRAVO can shotgun blast into.
And to clarify i meant a disproportionate amount of "normie" people "crave" content that a relative sliver of the Elite / Intellectual class (i include myself here, if Yall will have me) just find...unbecoming. And it has always been true that this content largely subsidized countless more "becoming" content creators that the Gatekeepers personally found more appealing and worthy of investment?
Very much so - just think of the syndicated middle-low brow trash TV shows that filled the airwaves, mostly on weekends, during the 90's and 2000's that otherwise had no cultural value but somehow created thousands of hours of content, and in plenty of cases, SPINOFFS of the mediocrities that spawned them
My fear is that, if we don't have the correct mental model of how these monopolies (media monopolies of the 50s or 60s, or tech monopolies of the 00s) are actually "winning" and supporting themselves...then you stand almost no shot at regulating them, or beating them to capture whatever the next "thing" is....
And no matter how thoroughly we plan and organize attempts to overcome that, we are sort of doomed to fail in those efforts aren't we?
You certainly aren't gonna win solidarity with vast Youtube or Podcast creators throwing up schlock by (not so) low key signaling you actually think their "popular" content is garbage and should *not* exist in your vision of Utopia...
...less appealing (but more Prestige) content is exactly how we got here. Otherwise, Disney could have bought Google in 1999 or 2002 instead of spending money on competing search engine Infoseek instead.
And I am not sure you really "win" by trying to reinstall a defaco Social Elite gatekeeper situation (no matter who controls it)...especially not at this moment in time with the digital tools at hand.
On one teenage boredom-killing occasion my friends dragged me to the Dukes of Hazzard. I've never entirely forgiven them. Late-night TV had a much bigger influence on my eclectic taste; anecdotally I feel like they don't show as many good movies on TV these days (more Transformers, fewer confusing psychosexual thrillers), but who knows? That could just be nostalgia talking.
Goddamn - as a long-time goon (reg'd in 2004 and still shitposting there occasionally, yikesaroo), your theory of Something Awful being the cause and catalyst for the worst posters online just caused me to drop my Kobayashi tea cup as that realization hits everything I have experienced
you never elaborated on what Stancil meant by "race science is fake." If he means science that purports to show that minorities are dumber than others for genetic reasons, I'd tend to agree with him. Is that what he is talking about?
Your idea is gibberish. A "Youtube union" would not be a union; it would be the MPAA/AMPTP. There is nothing stopping existing unions from unionising areas where it makes sense - i.e. people employed by channels. Your argument seems to be based on a vague idea that a "Youtube union" will somehow curtail supply.
Having been on somethingawful like 10-15 years ago I don't think I could have predicted in a million years the level of influence fyad and lf would have on our culture. I think I would've guessed zero
From a practical perspective, I think the issue with unionizing youtube/tiktok/whatever is that would raise costs for the creators of the videos, unless youtube/tiktok subsidizes it somehow, not sure how that would work considering these companies rely on user created content. Right now we expect social media content to be “free”rather than hollywood productions, which the general public still expects to pay to see a movie (or at least pay for the streaming service its on)
I’ve been thinking about this since week when a youtube channel I enjoy (Watcher) tried to move all their videos off the site and put them onto a streaming service with a monthly fee and the fans completely revolted. Within 72 hours the channel backtracked and returned to youtube, and posted a video apologizing to their fans. I think social media users are happy to give creators a lot of their time, but none of their money.
That's an interesting insight about movies as boredom killer. I wonder if that's what killed (some) malls as well.
My friends and I snuck into Summer Catch and got caught because there were three of us and they hadn’t sold any tickets. They let us purchase tickets instead of kicking us out. (“Free” air conditioning used to be a compelling reason to catch a movie) anyway that’s how I spent September 10th, 2001.
Wow, crazy that the only four people who saw Summer Catch are connected like this
For all of great fair labor practices they fight for, unions obviously also serve as a gatekeeper for those who can work on studio projects and who cannot (not a critque, just stating it). But youtube's pitch to "creators" is that those gates do not exist. So would a youtube labor union only pertain to those who make money through the platform? Or would you want youtube to effectively become another hollywood studio and disallow those with a little league umpire nut shot to upload their clip?
The cop-out answer is that this is something that has to be worked out in the organizing and bargaining process, and would depend a lot on the specific demands of the organized streamers as well as a lot of stuff about YouTube's business model that I'm not sure we know very well. (E.g., how much revenue is derived from random nut-shot videos uploaded by non-partners, and what is the cost associated with hosting them?) But in principle I don't see why the structure couldn't parallel Hollywood's--if you want to partner with YouTube to earn revenue, you (or your employees, for studios that publish to YouTube) need to be in the streamers guild, just as if you want to make movies with the big studios, you need to be in the WGA. Anyone is welcome to upload whatever videos they want for their own purposes, just as I can make movies in my backyard with my friends and release them independently of the major studios and distributors. (I'm singling out YouTube in part because it has such a well-entrenched legal partnership program that "naturally" creates a bargaining unit, versus a place like Instagram where all kinds of influencers rely on the platform without any formal relationship.) My understanding is that YouTube is subject to many of the same power laws as other platforms, where the bulk of views and revenue come from a small fraction of videos, so I suspect it would be advantageous to everyone, not least of all the audience, to let the nut shots continue.
Not a cop-out but a great answer nonetheless...I didn't take into account that the actual dollars on youtube are being made by a small fraction of youtube partnered channels. Your proposed setup could be like prime video - buys/produces union bargained content and also allows people to gloat about their debut feature (or nut shot) being available (to rent) on Priime Video when all they did was upload it.
Then again, most of the nut shots have migrated to Tik Tok anyway (America's Funniest Home Videos --> Youtube --> Tik Tok/Reels).
For more evidence that film and television compete generally with other smartphone-enabled methods of time wasting, see Netflix's persistent (if poorly marketed so far) push into smartphone gaming: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/games
They even have a great content strategy, porting some of the best indie PC/console games of all time to mobile (eg. Hades, Into The Breach, Death’s Door, Kentucky Route Zero)!
This is of course explicitly because Netflix sees mobile games as competing with their film/tv content for share in the market of wasted time: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/20/22586084/netflix-gaming-strategy-earnings-explained
Totally--and, speaking of industries that really need to be unionized, labor conditions in gaming are atrocious !!
this brought back a beautiful teen memory of my friend and i seeing will ferrell's stranger than fiction in theaters, absolutely hating it (idk if i still would today but at the time i thought it was the worst thing i'd ever seen), and in our disappointment deciding to immediately go watch the prestige for the second time that week, which we both considered a cinematic masterpiece (also have not rewatched but i stand by this)
Now this wouldn't happen, because of woke
I think it's very astute to single in on the role boredom of the 90s and 00s played in keeping all sorts of media companies thriving, and i think it's correct to zero in on Youtube as competing directly with union organized labor in Hollywood...
But it also still seems too myopic...because it's not just that video is competing against video for hours in our day...it's that podcast audio is completing against video, and streaming music back catalogs are, and random X threads about niche current events, and books, and AI read audio of some NYT Style Section piece, etc. The real issue (as you sorta alluded to) is that Competition for Entertainment options is working TOO well...and if you admit to that, then the only REAL solution is to essentially gate keep some creators out of the market for entertainment (or cull the "algorithm chasing trash")... which, if we are being honest, is exactly what Media conglomerates did for decades by subsidizing Distribution monopolies with Advertising.
While I agree, much of it IS trash,...it's hard to ignore that Trash is what the vast majority of folks crave. And the blatant dismissal of that fact just sort of reminds me of how Media and Hollywood got here...which was taking for granted the reason why *most* people picked up those papers WAS the trash and advertisements...not the Prestige stuff the employees and Social Elite loved to dote on.
Has always bugged me that the inability to take Advertising / Trashes role in cross subsidizing
I genuinely dispute that people "crave" trash, so much as it's what they'll consume if it's convenient, cheap, and easy, and most of our systems are set up to make the worst stuff the easiest to get. People love gossip, true crime, sentimental glurge, it's true, but they also love novelty, ambition, and challenges, in the right contexts. To me the long-term (very long-term) solution isn't to reintroduce elite gatekeepers at the top, but to socialize and democratize the entertainment, publishing, newsmedia, etc. industries entirely, reorienting them away from bottom-line profit-chasing.
The only additional (and personal) context I will add is...my wife goes to GREAT lengths to steal her parents cable login info (among others!) just to watch every minute of Real Housewives content BRAVO can shotgun blast into.
And to clarify i meant a disproportionate amount of "normie" people "crave" content that a relative sliver of the Elite / Intellectual class (i include myself here, if Yall will have me) just find...unbecoming. And it has always been true that this content largely subsidized countless more "becoming" content creators that the Gatekeepers personally found more appealing and worthy of investment?
Very much so - just think of the syndicated middle-low brow trash TV shows that filled the airwaves, mostly on weekends, during the 90's and 2000's that otherwise had no cultural value but somehow created thousands of hours of content, and in plenty of cases, SPINOFFS of the mediocrities that spawned them
My fear is that, if we don't have the correct mental model of how these monopolies (media monopolies of the 50s or 60s, or tech monopolies of the 00s) are actually "winning" and supporting themselves...then you stand almost no shot at regulating them, or beating them to capture whatever the next "thing" is....
And no matter how thoroughly we plan and organize attempts to overcome that, we are sort of doomed to fail in those efforts aren't we?
You certainly aren't gonna win solidarity with vast Youtube or Podcast creators throwing up schlock by (not so) low key signaling you actually think their "popular" content is garbage and should *not* exist in your vision of Utopia...
...less appealing (but more Prestige) content is exactly how we got here. Otherwise, Disney could have bought Google in 1999 or 2002 instead of spending money on competing search engine Infoseek instead.
And I am not sure you really "win" by trying to reinstall a defaco Social Elite gatekeeper situation (no matter who controls it)...especially not at this moment in time with the digital tools at hand.
On one teenage boredom-killing occasion my friends dragged me to the Dukes of Hazzard. I've never entirely forgiven them. Late-night TV had a much bigger influence on my eclectic taste; anecdotally I feel like they don't show as many good movies on TV these days (more Transformers, fewer confusing psychosexual thrillers), but who knows? That could just be nostalgia talking.
It does sound like a kind of tampon
Goddamn - as a long-time goon (reg'd in 2004 and still shitposting there occasionally, yikesaroo), your theory of Something Awful being the cause and catalyst for the worst posters online just caused me to drop my Kobayashi tea cup as that realization hits everything I have experienced
*drop your Lowtax-brand tea cup
you never elaborated on what Stancil meant by "race science is fake." If he means science that purports to show that minorities are dumber than others for genetic reasons, I'd tend to agree with him. Is that what he is talking about?
I don't do Twitter so I've never encountered him.
Yep!
Your idea is gibberish. A "Youtube union" would not be a union; it would be the MPAA/AMPTP. There is nothing stopping existing unions from unionising areas where it makes sense - i.e. people employed by channels. Your argument seems to be based on a vague idea that a "Youtube union" will somehow curtail supply.
Weirdly hostile comment!
Having been on somethingawful like 10-15 years ago I don't think I could have predicted in a million years the level of influence fyad and lf would have on our culture. I think I would've guessed zero
The Stancil argument is also the one that the Menswear Guy has advanced for his own posting skills-- early 2000s forum culture is a different beast.
From a practical perspective, I think the issue with unionizing youtube/tiktok/whatever is that would raise costs for the creators of the videos, unless youtube/tiktok subsidizes it somehow, not sure how that would work considering these companies rely on user created content. Right now we expect social media content to be “free”rather than hollywood productions, which the general public still expects to pay to see a movie (or at least pay for the streaming service its on)
I’ve been thinking about this since week when a youtube channel I enjoy (Watcher) tried to move all their videos off the site and put them onto a streaming service with a monthly fee and the fans completely revolted. Within 72 hours the channel backtracked and returned to youtube, and posted a video apologizing to their fans. I think social media users are happy to give creators a lot of their time, but none of their money.
FAMILY MAN is in my top 5 holiday movies (possibly top 2 but if I think about it too hard I'll suddenly have lost an hour of my day)
I do love Tea Leoni