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the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession. You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people tha
by jmyeet 2y ago
the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession.
You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.
I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session musicians and so forth.
This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.
What holds this system together is that too many people believe that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.
- argentinian 2y agoWhy do you think that are so many willing to work for pennies, instead of changing profession? Or so many willing to pick a profession that is known beforehand to usually have low wages?
- schmidtleonard 2y agoPeople have a drive to work on beautiful and important things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
- argentinian 2y agoWhat do you think about the model of supply and demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand in relation to low paid beautiful and important jobs?
- schmidtleonard 2y agoMore people than jobs, which is why they are so easy to exploit.
- argentinian 2y agoMore people than "beautiful important" jobs. But there are other, less sexy and better paid, important jobs.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoWe could gate the special jobs behind a contest rather than abuse. Just a thought -- but not the most profitable one. Labor demand is structurally lower than supply. That's the state of the modern world and it could have been a good thing. Instead, even important unsexy work is systematically demeaned and marginalized by this fact. See: unskilled labor -> essential workers -> unskilled labor. The proceeds are boiled away and condensed onto financial assets, which serve the purpose of paying rich people for being rich in proportion to how rich they are. This establishes, reinforces, and perpetuates a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist.
- argentinian 2y agoWhat do you think that would be a possible solution? Defining minimum wages?
- danans 2y agoIn addition to minimum wages indexed for inflation, more unions and stronger labor protection laws that allow the unions to negotiate. Also on the entrepreneurship side, more public support for small to midsize companies that share capital and power with their workers. Plutocracy and oligarchy (what we have today) and the modern serfdom they rely on suppress the creative and industrial talents of workers.
- argentinian 2y agoWhat do you call 'modern serfdom'?
- johnnyanmac 2y agowell at least you can make very comfortable money in games. Maybe less than half of what you get at google, but half of $300k is still far past what most people can ever hope to aspire from. Games are still tech after all. On the indie side, I'd much rather take my hopes to transfer that talent to makig the next hollow knight than the equivalent in music to be the next Bieber. I'm not going to call it a meritocracy, but games (for now) still have a reasonable monetization model. I hope by the time I can make my own game that that's still somewhat the case.
- BJones12 2y ago> the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession. You see this in Hollywood with ... Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits. From my understanding Hollywood is being killed by the outsiders - TikTok et al influencers taking viewers away from Hollywood. The corporate owners are cutting costs, but it's primarily to survive. And the reason that TikTok influencers would be killing Hollywood is simply because Hollywood has (had) the money, fame, and influence, and the TikTok crowd wanted it. It's creator-on-creator violence in a fight for status.