More Than Television and Movies: AI, Art, and the Struggle for Humanity

As social media breaks into splinters and conditions deteriorate in general, I want to ask once again for your support. A lot of what I detail in this article has already taken place in academia, which was at the forefront of this new, exploitative push, and having left the halls of higher education to provide analysis and work to find solutions, I rely on DISPATCHES FROM A COLLAPSING STATE, patrons of THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST, and sales of my books, like THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS, for a living. While publishing these things, I’m also hard at work collaborating with non-profits and efforts to fight back and am putting together a plan for my next book, which I feel confident will be my best endeavor yet.

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Brutal.

That’s the only way to describe it, this anonymously-sourced quote in Deadline regarding the gameplan by studio executives in handling the Writers Guild strike.

It is the type of tough talk you get familiar with when it comes to labor struggles. Posturing drivel that reveals the coldheartedness that decades’ worth of public appearances and glad-handing reveals couldn’t paper over. In planning to “win” the struggle against their writers, executives are counting on literally destroying them financially. It might appear as an item in the industry rag, but what is being communicated here is very real and very bloody.

They want writers to buckle under the pressure. They want their livelihoods to ground to a halt until they lose their homes. Until they lose everything. Until their partners and families and children lose everything. Until the suffering gets so bad, so unacceptable, that they come crawling back begging for scraps.

This is the awful truth behind all of this. It isn’t about your favorite series or movies or the content that makes your day go down a little easier. It is a generational struggle that has been looming for years now and encompasses the larger crisis that grips this country, this society, and more or less the entirety of the world. The grip of neoliberal globalism, with its inhumanity and desperate, clawing need for soaring profits and increasing exploitation has dug a ditch so deep that it threatens to swallow us whole.

Late last night, SAG-AFTRA signalled an imminent desire to strike, creating a total shutdown scenario that Hollywood hasn’t seen in over sixty years. The actors joining the writers on the picket lines will press the issue even harder, and hopefully wake up the populace to the fact that something much, much larger is taking place.

As I have written about previously, the answer to the moment is solidarity and growing a grassroots movement that reignites opposition to corporate dominance and reinvigorates democratic energies to level the playing field. It’s no coincidence that these labor actions are joined by others, including varied operations opposing some of the biggest companies in the history of the world and potential strikes, like the one brewing with UPS. Some of this is covered briefly on cable news and in the papers, but considering the corporate bent of corporate media, it largely gets detailed in passing, in the C or D block while culture war items and posturing by our petty politicians dominate the airwaves.

But something is happening. And what’s more, it has to.

Though we are trained to believe that conditions as awful as these can last forever, and thus any resistance is futile, the truth is that worsening exploitation lends itself to frustration, organizing, and labor frictions. After all, when people aren’t getting paid enough money to live, when it’s almost impossible for people to buy homes, to afford healthcare and food, you reach a point where there is simply nothing to lose. Of course, as I’ve warned about, the end goal is to create a labor situation so terrible that child labor becomes increasingly more acceptable (as it already is), the road to that particular hell is going to be fraught with pushback.

In the case of Hollywood, the specifics are telling about where things are going. Because of the entertainment nature of it all, it can feel a little disconnected from the reality most of us live within. It is, after all, where dreams are made. But advancements in both corporate models (the barbaric streaming system that is built on the unchained corporate monopoly structure and bloodless investment strategies) and artificial intelligence are striking there first, and these reactions give us an idea of what awaits many of us.

I have often warned that AI will not be the godsend the Tech world has often promised us. The idea, all along, has been that it will “free” us from our labor, creating a more level society. But that’s been the lie since the beginning of industrialization, and those with the power and the money to create the technology have always used advancements to harm the labor force and increase exploitation and profits. AI now is a missing piece that so many of these corporate dictators has long dreamed of. They lack the creativity of the writers and, for that matter, the actors, and so employing a technology that can give them CONTENT to peddle is what they believe will eliminate the need for those meddlesome individuals.

Of course, what AI lacks is humanity. When we watch movies, television shows, when we listen to podcasts, when we do almost anything that is now labeled CONTENT, what we’re looking for, really, is a glimmer of humanity. What we desire, what we have always desired, is to see in others what we fear is only in ourselves. The loneliness of being a human, of having these thoughts, these feelings, these insecurities, these dreams and these hopes, is lifted through the magic of art through which we can see that we are truly, truly, mercifully, not alone.

AI can only provide a simulation of that. It can steal ideas and expressions from past writers, from past CONTENT, but in the end all it gives is a thin impression of humanity. Already, in the corporate streaming era, we can see glimmers of this poison as it is merely taking shape and previewing what’s to come. We see it in franchises we loved and now feel ambivalent at best or repulsed by at worst. I loved Star Wars as a kid, saw so much in it that resonated with me. Now, watching it juiced for everything it’s worth by Disney and peddled out as a corporate product on a corporate timeline designed to maximize its profits is as disgusting as anything I could imagine.

The advent of AI will make it possible to create more and more human-less CONTENT that will suck but will fill the airwaves. Meanwhile, the streaming structure will continue to make the writer, the actor, the creators, less and less important, choosing to destroy dreams for tax write-offs and exploit everything it can exploit. The only way this can be changed is if this problem is dealt with now and in this place. Otherwise, like almost everything else Tech related, the thing will get ahead of all of us too quickly and will never be able to be put back in its place.

We have our own roles to play in this struggle. We need to move past the alluring desire to check out from this worsening world through the anesthetic pleasures of CONTENT. Streaming and binging have become modern drugs, and like all drugs what they offer, in abused quantities, is the ability to look away from ourselves and the world and pass time and ignore hurt. It literally asks us not to look for that humanity for which we are all starving and desiring, and instead just consume consume consume. Now, much like like how the pandemic offered us an opportunity to pause and reflect, is a good time to recognize rising authoritarianism and the role that distraction and consumption play in shepherding it forward.

Now is the time to reconsider ourselves and how we approach the world. Because this mess doesn’t stop in Hollywood. Like climate change affects certain areas first and then spreads outward, this is going to seep into every part of our lives. And even if you enjoy a nice white-collar job, you need to understand that existence, which was a product of America’s ascension into a global hegemonic force, and was merely a symptom of globalism’s construction, is in danger, because as globalism recedes and the need for worsening exploitation grows, you will be on the chopping block as well.

We have an opportunity to strike back. We have a chance to stop this before it gets to be too late. We do not have to sleepwalk into a future filled with strife and manned by corporate hatchet-men whose only “talent” is a willingness to following Wall Street’s diction and an eagerness to watch our children starve.