We’re having quite an apocalyptic summer. Wildfire smoke chokes the air of major cities. Amid a brutal heatwave, striking workers muster picket lines on scorching streets. The screenwriters of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have been on strike for nearly three months. Last week they were joined by 160,000 members of Sag-Aftra, the actors’ union. Hollywood is closed for business. Everyone is scared that artificial intelligence could steal away our jobs. It’s hot. Tempers are short. The whole entertainment industry is out of work and angry and ready to lean into class war. It feels a little scary. It feels a little giddy. It feels like anything might happen this year.
This is good. If there wasn’t a huge fight happening right now, the implications would be much, much worse.
It can be tempting to demonize Hollywood as the source of all of society’s ills. The right hates them for being decadent limousine liberals undermining traditional values, and the left hates them for being decadent limousine liberals spreading America’s pernicious capitalist myths worldwide. But what is happening right now should be understood as Hollywood’s redemption.
The thousands of workers engaged in this enormous, multi-union Hollywood strike – something America hasn’t seen since 1960 – represent the frontline of two battles that matter to every single American. You might not naturally pick “writers and actors” to be the backbone of your national defense force, but hey, we go to war with the army we have. In this case, they are well suited to the fight at hand.
The first battle is between humanity and artificial intelligence. Just a year ago, it seemed like a remote issue, a vague and futuristic possibility, still tinged with a touch of sci-fi. Now, AI has advanced so fast that everyone has grasped that it has the potential to be to white-collar and creative work what industrial automation was to factory work. It is the sort of technology that you either put in a box, or it puts you in a box. And who is going to build the guardrails that prevent the worst abuses of AI?
Look around. Do you believe that the divided US government is going to rouse itself to concerted action in time to regulate this technology, which grows more potent by the month? They will not. Do you know, then, the only institutions with the power to enact binding rules about AI that protect working people from being destroyed by a bunch of impenetrable algorithms that can produce stilted, error-filled simulacrums of their work at a fraction of the cost?
Unions. When it comes to regulating AI now, before it gets so widely entrenched that it’s impossible to roll back, union contracts are the only game in town. And the WGA and Sag-Aftra contracts, which cover entire industries, will go down in history as some of the first major efforts to write reasonable rules governing this technology that is so new that even knowing what to ask for involves a lot of speculation.
What we know for sure is this: if we leave AI wholly in the hands of tech companies and their investors, it is absolutely certain that AI will be used in a way that takes the maximum amount of money out of the pockets of labor and deposits it in the accounts of executives and investment firms. These strikes are happening, in large part, to set the precedent that AI must benefit everyone rather than being a terrifying inequality accelerator that throws millions out of work to enrich a lucky few. Even if you have never been to Hollywood, you have a stake in this fight. AI will come for your own industry soon enough.
And that brings us to the second underlying battle here: the class war itself. When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows (or do carpentry, or catering, or chauffeuring, or the zillion other jobs that Hollywood produces) are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.
In this sense, the entertainment industry is just like every other industry operating under America’s rather gruff version of capitalism. If left to their own devices, companies will always try to push labor costs towards zero and executive pay towards infinity. The preferred state of every corporation in America is one in which all of its employees earn just enough money to survive and the CEO and investors earn enough money to build private rockets to escape to a private Mars colony for billionaires. The only – the only – thing that stops this process is labor power. That comes from unions. The walls that unions build protect not just their own members, but by extension the entire working class. That is what’s at stake here.
So do not make the mistake of seeing these strikes as something remote from the realities of your own life. Hollywood has many flaws, but its most redeeming quality is that it is a strongly unionized industry. Unlike in most places, its workers have the ability to fight back against abuse, whether it comes from AI’s dead-hearted algorithms or from David Zaslav’s stupid rich smug face. The strikers in the streets are taking upon themselves the responsibility of drawing a line in the sand, saying that the excesses of inequality must stop here and now. Whatever they win will help us all.
And they will win. Bet on it. Go out to a picket line and you will believe me. They will win because they are truly pissed; they will win because they are willing to suffer for what is necessary; and, most of all, they will win because Hollywood executives can’t act or write.
All those executives can do is sell what the actors and the writers make, and steal as much of the profit as they can grab. But when the work stops, there is nothing to sell. There are no profits. And while everyone on the picket line finds love and community and purpose, the executives will find nothing but empty theaters and public scorn. Pretty soon, nobody will remember why they got paid so much money in the first place.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York City and a member of the WGAE
