Media Production in a Solarpunk Future Better World
Next week I am going to talk once more about stuff outside of Solarpunk, but let me end this a bit with some more utopianism about a topic I care about a lot as some of you know. Media production. No matter the type of media. Books, movies, shows, animated, live action, audio plays, music, games.
I wish it was not news when I told people, that media production has been in trouble for a long time. People who follow one industry or another might know - but yeah. Issues are the same for the most part.
To make it short: No matter what type of media you make, you are constantly competing with a lot of other folks not just for budget, but also for the ability to publish it. Sure, some stuff can be published independently easier, but even then it is often an issue to monetize it. You can totally publish movies and shows on Youtube, yeah, but monetizing it properly is hard at times. Same goes with audio stuff. Yeah, you can put music and podcasts on a lot of platforms like Spotify - but good luck to see a dime from it. Also, if you publish it yourself, you do need to do the marketing yourself, making you very depedent on the algorithm liking you.
Sure, there is some stuff that is a bit easier to do independently. Getting a book out is fairly easy - but that makes the market also overrun with slob and makes it hard to stand out in terms of marketing. And if you are doing games... Well, Steam makes it fairly easy by now to publish indie games and monetize them, but again: Marketing is fucking hard.
And that is without getting to the other problem: You need a budget to begin with. Like, sure, this is somewhat easier with books or if you are an artist yourself comics. It will eat up your free time, but a lot of folks have written books in their free time, as most people who publish books and comics never get rich with it. Yeah, most of us writers and also the comic book artists will burn out on it, but... it is possible to do.
However, you cannot do a movie on your own. You cannot do a series on your own. No matter if it is animated or live action. You will at least need a couple of actors and a couple of people to do the technical stuff. You also need sets for life action, and licenses for animation software for animation and so on and so forth.
And yeah, sure, you can make an indie game with a fairly small team and some even managed to make games on their lonesome, but... it is hard, you might well burn out, and also: Either you have some money to do it full-time, or it will probably take you ages.
Which basically is why Kickstarter exists.
This is not just a curse that afflicts small creators - even though those tend to be affected a whole lot more - but even bigger names in each industry. Especially these days.
See, when it comes to especially movie and tv production, the tendency has been more and more to make either super cheap stuff (like game shows and such) or super expensive stuff (blockbuster) with fairly few things falling in between. Basically it tends to eb: "Go big, or go home."
And as anyone who is obsessing about any piece of media: No matter how much budget there theoretically is, there is crunch. Meaning: At some point in the production people are working 14+ hours a day seven days a week. Often towards the end of the production, when the deadline is around the corner and stuff needs to be finished, because whoever gives the money, wants to put out the finished product.
Sure, if you are indie, you technically do not have deadlines of others to meet, but chances are, that at some point there will be crunch to finish a project.
And, oh boy, once your thing gets released, it will just get even more chaotic, because we are living in an online world, where anything can happen.
Now, let me get this straight: Yes, there are people who are making media with bad intentions (just look at those Daily Wire freaks). But most of the people tend to make their media with innocent enough intentions.
Does not matter. Chances exist always that someone will feel attacked by it. Oh, you have a Black main character? Great, now the right wingers will spend hours upon hours crying about it. You have a gay character who is not nice? Well, now some radical queers will complain about it how it is bad representation (does not matter that you are gay yourself and it is kinda autobiographic). You have made an adaption? Great, someone will complain it is not close enough to whatever source material it is - not understanding that you cannot translate a piece of media into another medium without changing stuff. And so on and so forth.
Of course, some things can be viable critcisms. But in these days, chances are that you will get insulted on social media, if not hounded by death threats.
Unless of course there are people who really love your stuff, in which case you will likely experience another sort of harassment. Especially if you are an actor or a musician or someone else who puts their face out there.
I hope I do not need to continue this.
And here is the thing: Humans are evolved monkey, who mainly involved to sit around and tell stories and do art. I am not even exaggerating here. From all we know our brains did in fact evolve to do that, which is why so many people do dream of doing something in the creative industries. It is literally there in our genes.
Why did we evolve that? I don't fucking know. I guess telling stories somehow gave us an evolutionary advantage.
So, basically for the most part humanity right now can be seperated into three groups. The people who actually do not want to be creative. The people who want to be but do not get the chance and are miserable because of it. And the people who did get the chance, and are likely burning themselves out, as they do. Hooray. This is working great.
Oh, by the way, even if what you do gets somehow super successful... If you are not indie, someone else will snatch most of the money your thing did away from you. Sorry.
However, here is some facts:
- We absolutely do have the technology for most things that are needed to keep society running to be at least partially automated. A lot of jobs that are right now getting paid are Bullshit Jobs, that just exist to exhaust people.
- We also could absolutely build a system in which everyone was taken care off in terms of basic needs (housing, education, food, medicine) without needing to work. Again, we are already there.
- Not every movie or game or whatever needs to be high budget with amazing graphics and special effects. Yes, some people will glaim this, but in the end, storytelling is a lot more important I would argue.
- We absolutely could take away the control from the people who right now create artificial bottlenecks in regards to what does and does not get released.
- Same goes for stuff like shelf-space and concert halls, that often by now gets to be dictated by a few companies. This does not need to be that way.
- Also, we could greatly overhaul the copyright system, putting copyright down from up to 100 years as it is right now, to like 5 to 10 years.
If everyone's basic needs were taken care of, people could just take some time of to do their creative projects without having to burn themselves out doing basically two jobs, one of which might in fact be a bullshit job.
If we produced cheaper media, a lot mroe people would get to do it - and the conditions for it would largely improve. After all, it is the fact that a lot of stuff costs hundreds of millions that make the investors now push for specific dates. (Well, also the fact that investors tend to be shitty people, but that's a topic for another day.) It could help to reduce crunch at the very least.
If we removed the endlessness of copyright, media power would be less concentrated in a couple of companies - who mainly hold that power because of the IP they own. If the IP becomes public domain after 10 years, everyone could do fun stuff with it. And if you are opposed to this, remember: It is highly unlikely to become a millionaire with a piece of media - especially more than 10 years after the initial release. Either it takes of fairly quickly or barely at all. If it takes of initially, wonderful, you can make the money during those first few years. If it doesn't: Well it is not as if you are loosing out of much. Right now the endless copyright mostly profits big companies like Disney, Warner and so on.
Also, if movies and such were smaller, there simply would be a lot less incentive to create an outcry, because there would be more of it.
Right now (especially post-pandemic, which has harmed the media industry a lot) we get maybe 10-15 blockbuster movies a year, a handful of blockbuster TV seasons, and probably around 6-12 AAA gaming titles. So, whenever one of those comes out, the internet will talk about these, because advertisement will give you FOMO if you do not talk about it. Which obviously inspires folks to have a lot stronger opinions on everything. Which then creates the toxic online discourse. Sure, you might also get toxic online discourse over some indie stuff - because there is just indie stuff that will break containment for one reason or another. But mainly it will be stuff with a lot of money behind it. Only that of course, while officially everyone is angry then at Disney or Ubisoft or whatever, they will usually then harass the actors or some other person who was in the main creative team. (Just remember how much people bullied the Korean actress in The Last Jedi. Like, not to mention that I loved that movie, but even if you hated it and if you hated her role, it was not her fault that role existed and was written like that. Same goes for example for the guy who played Jar Jar Binks back in the day, who was nearly driven to suicide for playing a character in movie.)
Having smaller budgets also would kinda stop making some people into those big stars, who then get the whole celebrity treatment which almost certainly will be a horror for anyone's mental health - no matter in which direction it goes.
I love media. I love storytelling. I love art. But right now there is just so much going wrong, which in turn leads to heaps and heaps of abuse of workers in any of the respective industry. And I think that does not have to be that way.
Most people I know who do creative work for a living love their jobs. But they also tend to struggle a lot with some aspects of it.
I personally got the chance to visit a mid-budget Hollywood movie shoot when I was just two years out of high school, and while I wanted to do this until that point, it was a very, very crunchy shoot. People were crying. People were angry and exhausted. And I stood there: "Yeah, okay, if I ended up in this situation, I would absolutely break under the pressure." And decided to not further pursue any professional creative stuff outside of storywriting.
Still. We could so so much better.
