Thread by @jonrog1

1) Something (very stupid) you’re going to see over the next weeks are people arguing that screenwriters are being unreasonable. “Times have changed”. No. Times WERE changed. By SOMEBODY. By PEOPLE, making CHOICES.

2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!

3) Bullshit. Economies, markets, are products of human thought. They are shaped by the rules we place upon them and distorted by the will of those who operate within them.

4) The Hollywood market is currently being distorted by choices made by powerful people with considerable agency. The most foolish of these choices is to no longer make the metric of success be … well, success.

5) The bosses of these companies have stopped caring about whether the shows and movies are profitable — because THEY ARE, we know they are, the companies have made between $28-30 BILLION in profit — PROFIT — *every year for the last five years*.

6) They’ve decided to chase the classic techbro, financialization metric, the mania of modern Wall Street — growth. Nonstop growth. Something you can base stock options on. But as the man says, the only thing that grows forever is cancer, and even that eventually kills the host.

7) The new robber barons of Hollywood are on a suicide run. They’ll extract as much wealth out of the system as they can before it crashes, and they’ll beat up the workforce as much as they need to to create “savings” to make Wall Street happy, to stretch out the run.

8) THIS IS NOT NEW. This is classic vulture capitalism, this is what happened to K-mart, Toys R’ US, this is airline stock buybacks, it’s just moved from hard infrastructure and retail to the information and entertainment world.

9) So this struggle may seem like a very specialized conflict, between a very small Guild of unusual professionals and their very specific employers. But this is 100% part of the larger madness that’s drowning the modern economy. It’s all the same fight, this one’s just nerdier.

10) The WGA is just lucky — and not really lucky, we’re benefitting from 90 years of other writers sacrificing for us — that we happen to be organized enough and powerful enough, when our turn came, to draw a line.

11) (Spoiler alert for other unions and workers -- your time will always come)

12) There’s a well-established, profitable system to make quality entertainment that keeps everybody happy, healthy, paid, and in shape to make their best possible work, for the delight of millions of audience members. That system is being gutted, thanks to hubris and greed.

13) Man, I do not want to strike, None of us do. But if we don’t, mine is the last generation of screenwriters who will even have a chance to have a stable career.

14) We will damn all the screenwriters who come after us to a gig economy, with all that entails. I’ll go down swinging to stop that. I owe the writers who came before and those who come after.

15) See you on the line tomorrow, and every day, for as long as it takes. #WGAStrong

PS your usual reminder that once a thread hits 1k RT’s I’m no longer in the Replies.