Tag: luddites

How the Writers Guild sunk AI’s ship

No one’s gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can’t fire their workers.

A wrecked, listing, rusting tanker whose side is emblazoned with the menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ In the foreground, a woman dressed in a natty 1930s skirt-suit holds a WGA picket sign that reads, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write a sign and it SUCKED.’”
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

After a grinding, 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America ran the table, conceding virtually nothing and winning virtually everything.

The most consequential outcome will be data on streaming viewership. For the studios, these numbers are state secrets, revealed on a need-to-know, burn-before-reading basis, even within the studios themselves.

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Pluralistic: Down in the (link)dumps (23 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Hollywood is the single best example of mature labor power in America; On the Media on the enshittification (pt 1) (06 May 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk" (20 Mar 2023)


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Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk

They turned the cottage into a factory.

A woodcut of a weaver’s loft, where a woman works at a hand-loom. Out of the window opposite her looms the glowing, menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ On the wall behind her is the poster from Magpie Killjoy’s ‘Steampunk Magazine’ that reads, ‘Love the machine, hate the factory.’
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

Despite what you may have heard, the Luddites weren’t technophobes. They were skilled workers, expert high tech machine operators who supplied the world with fine textiles. Thanks to a high degree of labor organization through craft guilds, the workers received a fair share of the profit from their labors. They worked hard, but they earned enough through their labors to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.

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Pluralistic: Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem (09 Feb 2023)


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Pluralistic: 10 Jan 2022


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