If you want Marxist analysis specifically, there’s a reason that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall. As laborpower becomes more efficient, it makes firms more able to scale, which in turn makes labor a bottleneck to be further squeezed for profit.
Think about a web server. A simple server will use roughly as much energy to respond to 100 requests as it uses to respond to 100k requests. (Sorry if the exact numbers are wrong, devops people). At the very least, the power usage will not be 1000x greater. So now your bottleneck to scaling that large is the engineer team who will upkeep that server. As the ability to optimize decreases (once the low hanging fruit is captured and the industry has matured) the only way to keep profits going is to squeeze labor.
In the case of a lot of media industries, younger and younger talent is brought in to produce works which are increasingly designed by committee to leverage established intellectual property.
This is why intellectual property is so important to modern capitalists. The average direct-to-video Disney sequel made at least an order of magnitude less money than the originals they were based off of. But the originals were such hits that those sequels still outperformed their original-IP flops. This pattern has propagated all over the place to the point where even the MCU’s flops performed like moderate hits.
In other words, labor is less of a bottleneck for these properties because the companies have figured out how to create them with lower-skilled labor.
I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of unskilled labor. If labor didn’t involve skill, no one would need to specialize in it. But in the case of media, a decade or two of experience in the craft and the ability to exercise artistic license tends to create a more enjoyable product.
Maybe a better way to put it is that the “meritocracy” of media industries increasingly defines “merit” as having less to do with artistic skill and more to do with a desire to work long hours with shit pay and no complaints. Because they already have the “art” figured out
Yes. Cultural symbols can be very strong and very motivating, which is why capitalists have put so much time and energy into disrupting the means by which we create, reify, and interact with them.
A symbol as simple, ingrained, and significant as “skull = death” will now be a commodified element for the brand guide of an ad campaign to target a statistically identified marketing demographic cluster, which some shitty marketing startup running out of Oregon has oh-so-wittily titled “Witches & Bitches” based on some obscure AI algorithm which claims the “anonymized” health data they just bought en masse indicates these people have an interest in countercultural clothing
And if this algorithm can provide a 10% YOY increase in click through rate KPIs these trust fund tech bros will make millions off of Witches & Bitches
If you want Marxist analysis specifically, there’s a reason that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall. As laborpower becomes more efficient, it makes firms more able to scale, which in turn makes labor a bottleneck to be further squeezed for profit.
Think about a web server. A simple server will use roughly as much energy to respond to 100 requests as it uses to respond to 100k requests. (Sorry if the exact numbers are wrong, devops people). At the very least, the power usage will not be 1000x greater. So now your bottleneck to scaling that large is the engineer team who will upkeep that server. As the ability to optimize decreases (once the low hanging fruit is captured and the industry has matured) the only way to keep profits going is to squeeze labor.
In the case of a lot of media industries, younger and younger talent is brought in to produce works which are increasingly designed by committee to leverage established intellectual property.
This is why intellectual property is so important to modern capitalists. The average direct-to-video Disney sequel made at least an order of magnitude less money than the originals they were based off of. But the originals were such hits that those sequels still outperformed their original-IP flops. This pattern has propagated all over the place to the point where even the MCU’s flops performed like moderate hits.
In other words, labor is less of a bottleneck for these properties because the companies have figured out how to create them with lower-skilled labor.
I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of unskilled labor. If labor didn’t involve skill, no one would need to specialize in it. But in the case of media, a decade or two of experience in the craft and the ability to exercise artistic license tends to create a more enjoyable product.
Maybe a better way to put it is that the “meritocracy” of media industries increasingly defines “merit” as having less to do with artistic skill and more to do with a desire to work long hours with shit pay and no complaints. Because they already have the “art” figured out
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Yes. Cultural symbols can be very strong and very motivating, which is why capitalists have put so much time and energy into disrupting the means by which we create, reify, and interact with them.
A symbol as simple, ingrained, and significant as “skull = death” will now be a commodified element for the brand guide of an ad campaign to target a statistically identified marketing demographic cluster, which some shitty marketing startup running out of Oregon has oh-so-wittily titled “Witches & Bitches” based on some obscure AI algorithm which claims the “anonymized” health data they just bought en masse indicates these people have an interest in countercultural clothing
And if this algorithm can provide a 10% YOY increase in click through rate KPIs these trust fund tech bros will make millions off of Witches & Bitches