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What Happened To The Cultural Elites: Entertainment Workers

Posts in this series
What Happened To The Cultural Elites: Changes In The Conditions of Production

What Happened To The Cultural Elites: The Capitalist Celebration

Related Post
Symbolic Violence in Neoliberalism. This post describes symbolic structures and cultural producers which I call symbolic workers here.

The entertainment we enjoy helps us to understand our society, how we fit into it and what we might expect from our interactions with it. Some of what we learn can become part of our habitus, our predispositions in dealing with the world. I don’t have much of a framework for this, but I’m just going to plunge ahead. I know that this is too broad, so caveat: not all violence, not all romances, not all symbolic workers, etc; also hooray for escapism.

My general view is that the idea of markets has totally taken over the entertainment field, with bad consequences for individuals and our society. Every creative idea has to get access to a channel controlled by big capital. That requires getting past gatekeepers who are only interested in ideas with the potential for profit. That means sticking to the conventional wisdom, or at least not straying far from it. If you can’t get access, your idea is limited to small channels, and it only gets into public notice if it goes viral. Few things go viral, meaning that many clever ideas go nowhere.

In this post I’ll take two examples of the results: the culture of fear and violence, and reinforcement of the stereotypes of the relations between men and women.

I never thought much about the violence in the movies and on TV until I saw the 1991 movie, The Silence of the Lambs, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, and directed by Jonathan Demme. Here’s Roger Ebert’s review. He describes it as a horror movie, and true enough, the movie is terrifying and horrible. But it’s also a work of art, specifically murder and torture depicted artfully.

Rembrandt, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655, Louvre, Paris

Now I see the violence in movies and TV shows, and as ugly as it is, it doesn’t compare with cable news channels. They love shock and awe of bombing and missile attacks, and talk somberly about the regrettable loss of human life alongside tributes to our brave troops, all with the accompaniment of patriotic music. Local news competes on the basis of fires, car crashes and murders.

Michael Moore looked at the issue of gun violence in the US in his documentary Bowling For Columbine. He doesn’t draw firm conclusions, but points to several possible explanations, one of which is the culture of fear in the US. In the movie Moore interviews sociologist Barry Glassner, whose book The Culture of Fear was one of the influences behind the movie. I haven’t read the book, but here’s a review featuring an interview with Glassner.

“The public has become skeptical and critical of the news media in recent years – and part of the reason has to do with ignoring truly important concerns and compounding others beyond all reason,” said Glassner.

The sociologist ended up spending five years poring over more than 10,000 newspaper, radio and television accounts of social issues, and he discovered a distinct pattern.

“Scratch the surface of any pseudo-fear and you’ll find a wide array of groups that stand to benefit from promoting the scares, including businesses, advocacy organizations, religious sects and political parties,” Glassner said.

What Glassner and Moore portray is the contrast between the US self-description as the glorious Home of the Brave and the reality, a large population of bed-wetters. The bed-wetters aren’t brave, but they are full of bravado, much of it centered around their guns. They see themselves the brave men standing on the wall protecting us from immigrants and criminals. I’m pretty sure these images came from movies and TV shows.

Another major part of the entertainment business is books. Here’s a nice review of statistics on the industry, showing that one of the big genres is romance novels. Not coincidentally, romance is a big part of TV and movies. There are several cable channels devoted to this genre, including Lifetime and Hallmark. Romance books, movies and sitcoms reinforce the stereotypes of women. Ebert noticed a version of this in his review of Silence of The Lambs:

The movie has an undercurrent of unwelcome male attention toward [Jodie Foster’s] character; rarely in a movie have I been made more aware of the subtle sexual pressures men put upon women with their eyes.

In the horror/thriller genre, the primary role played by women is helplessness, and the male provides that help, rescuing her, or avenging her. That works in the romance genre as well. Here’s a blurb for a book currently on the Amazon Best Seller list for romance:

“Let’s get married.”

That was the last thing I had in mind.
Then I saw Holly, a curvy redhead in a tight green dress.
I knew she was mine. And I had to claim her.

Reading on we find out Holly been taken by a drug cartel, and he’s going to have to rescue her. Also, he’s a hot billionaire. There’s a whole subset of these books where the hero is a hot billionaire. It’s great that hot billionaires are just like regular guys only more so, built like linebackers and just dying to marry a random pretty grade school teacher or college dropout trying to make enough money to go back to college and learn to work with autistic children.

Hallmark movies are asexual versions of these books, only cheaper. The goal of the woman is to get married; the goal of her friends and family is to get her married; and it all works out and is sealed with a chaste kiss.

There is no sense of the real world in these movies. The couple never sleep together. They don’t talk about politics or housework or work or children or any of the other things dating couples get to eventually. No one lives in fear of job loss, or any kind of insecurity not related to getting married. The writers never get the details right; they seem indifferent to the way things work in the real world. There is always someone with a wise word about love that sounds like something from a self-help book. Of course these movies and books are escapism, but they reinforce stereotypes of the relations between men and women and a positive view of capitalism.

As Glassner says in the quote above, fear-mongering isn’t spontaneously generated. It’s stirred up by people seeking an advantage of some kind. They don’t do this directly. Instead, they hire symbolic workers and set them to work creating the symbolic structures that benefit them. In the first two posts in this series, I describe some of the overall influences affecting all cultural producers, the consolidation of employment and consequent reduction of entrepreneurial opportunities, and the general acceptance of capitalism as a given, rather than as a contested theory.

Our entertainment is created by large organizations funded by large pools of capital. That’s true of movies, television, professional sports and music. Workers in the entertainment field are subject to the pressures of commercialism, which cuts against their individual creativity and intellectual autonomy. And, they all accept the capitalist system as the overall structure of society and social relations.

The people who write romances books, make horrifyingly violent movies and operate cable news and local news are only able to reach the public through gatekeepers, all of which are large conglomerates. All of these symbolic workers are subject to the bureaucratic pressures affecting all salaried employees, and the hierarchy of these businesses ensure that the gatekeepers don’t screw up and let something subversive into the public arena.

As the entertainment industry has coalesced into a few giant players in each area from movies to television to publishing, the intellectual freedom and creativity of symbolic workers has been narrowed to a tiny range. Conglomeration is great for reproducing the class structure, and for reinforcing the conventional wisdom. The symbolic workers in this business aren’t intellectually autonomous in any real sense. No matter what they think of their jobs, they are merely doing the work of reinforcing the symbolic structures desired by their employers.

Three Things: Non-Nuclear Proliferation

The entire social media universe has been panicking over Fearless Leader’s whacked-out statement on North Korea at the end of his bigly speech yesterday on opioids. His hyperbole was on par with his decades of hawkishness about nuclear weapons, so both unsurprising while infuriating.

What I want to know: did he say what he did to distract from the Trump-Russia investigation underway, and/or did he say what he did roughly 30 minutes before the stock market closed for somebody’s benefit? I’d love to know who might have been short selling yesterday afternoon and this morning after his recent petulant tweet hyping the stock market’s record highs. Things don’t look good today, either, in spite of calming noises from Secretary of Exxon Tillerson.

[source: Google Finance]

Whatever. Let’s look at some non-nuclear matters.

~ 3 ~

The New York Times’ op-ed, Our Broken Economy, trended yesterday morning on Twitter and is still making waves today. It’s a pretty good read with compelling charts, if not very deep. Morons across the internet have misinterpreted what it tells us, which is that income has stagnated or fallen for the majority of the U.S. while the income of the uppermost 1% to .01% has skyrocketed in less than a decade. Loss of leverage in wage negotiations due to union busting and the skyrocketing cost of secondary education have held back the lower 80%.

What has most recently ‘weaponized’ the growth of income, while destroying any illusion of the American dream? In my opinion, three things contributed the most:

— the loss of Glass-Steagall Act and the subsequent unmooring of the financial industry from risk-reducing practices which siloed capital;

Citizens United, which exacerbated the trend toward regulatory capture;

— the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent loss of wealth for the lower 80% in terms of savings, investments, and property ownership.

But a fourth, rapidly growing factor is making difference and may also be exploding as an unintended consequence of legislation passed in 2007 requiring a larger percentage of margin on commodities trading. Algorithmic trading, conducted out of sight, skimming from every trade, on stocks rather than on commodities and at inhuman speed and scale, has increased unearned wealth but only for the very wealthiest.

Matt Bruenig says we must confront capital. Yes, but I think the appeal to do so is based in fairness, a universal ethic. A system which distorts pricing by not allocating true and full costs of the commons consumed to products and services  sold is unfair. It is not a ‘free market’ and certainly not a fair when the playing field isn’t level and not every business pays for what it consumes of the commons.

And it’s not fair when businesses deliberately suppress wages below workers’ real cost of living. That’s slavery. We don’t need charts to tell us something is wrong when the prevailing wage won’t provide meager shelter and food.

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The effect of Michigan’s criminal state government on Flint doesn’t remain in Flint. More than 70 new cases of Legionnaires disease have been reported in southeastern Michigan; this time the state’s health authorities have been prompt about reporting them, unlike the shoddy reporting around cases 2-3 years ago directly related to the water in Flint.

I will bet good money many of these new cases have a link to Flint since the water system has still not been completely replaced.

Eclectablog reminds us Flint’s Water Crisis is now at Day 678 and the city has yet to be made whole though Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder admitted he knew that Flint’s drinking water was poisoned with lead. There are still Flint residents who cannot drink their tap water without the use of a water filter.

Given the outbreak of Legionnaires disease, I wonder how many more Michiganders may actually sicken and die because of Rick Snyder’s handling of Flint’s financial emergency and the water system.

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You might already have read about the lawsuit filed against Disney for its failure to protect children’s privacy; I know Marcy tweeted about it. More than 40 applications Disney developed and sold collect information without consent about the kids using them, putting them at risk, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

But here’s what really bugs me about this on top of the privacy problems: Disney not only had a history with violating COPPA; the government went after them in 2011 and 2014 for problems with Playdom and MarvelKids. Disney must have known competitors Mattel and VTech had problems with their network-enabled electronic toys breaching children’s privacy circa November 2015. Why did Disney fail to remediate their 43 applications more than 18 months ago when both Mattel and VTech were under fire?

Disclosure: I own Disney stock. And yes, I’m thinking shareholders should be pissed off about this failure to disclose a material risk in financial reports BEFORE parents filed a lawsuit.

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That’s it for now. See you tomorrow if we haven’t already been fried to a crisp. This is an open thread – treat each other nicely.

Thursday Morning: Better than a Week

You know the joke: 4:30 p.m. is better than an hour away from 5:00 p.m., right? Thursday is better than a week away from the weekend. For folks traveling home for the Lunar New Year holiday in China, there are four days left to get home, and the train stations are crazy-full. But today is better than five days away from family and friends.

Goldman Sachs questions capitalism
YEAH. I KNOW. I did a double-take when I read the hed on this piece. In a GS analysts’ note they wrote, “There are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.” They’re freaking out because the market isn’t acting the way it’s supposed to, where new entrants respond to fat margins generated by first-to-market or mature producers.

I wonder how much longer it will take them to realize they killed the golden goose with their plutocratic rewards for oligopolies? How long before they realize this isn’t capitalism at all?

Whistleblower tells Swiss (and banks) to get over themselves on whistleblowing
Interviewed last week, former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld said, “We have to make some changes in Switzerland — it’s long overdue … The environment there is hostile toward people exposing corruption.” Birkenfeld’s remarks prod Swiss lawmakers currently at work on whistleblowing legislation. When passed, the law is not expected to offer protections employees have in the U.S. and the UK (and we know those are thin and constantly under attack). But perhaps the law will prevent cases like Nestle SA’s suit against a former executive who disclosed food safety risks. That suit and another alleging a former UBS employee libeled the bank may be affected assuming the EU adopts the same approach toward whistleblowing and corruption reduction.

“Computer failure” at IRS halts acceptance of tax return e-filings
No details about the nature of the “computer failure” apart from a “hardware problem” or “hardware failure” appeared in any reports yesterday afternoon and overnight. The IRS expects to have repairs completed today to allow e-filings once again; filings already submitted are not affected.

FBI agent on new car purchases: entering ‘wild, wild west’
Four cybersecurity experts spoke at a meeting of the Automotive Press Association in Detroit yesterday, one of whom was an FBI cyber squad agent. The feedback from the speakers wasn’t reassuring, apart from the observation by a specialist from a start-up automotive cyber security firm that they did not know of a “real world incident where someone’s vehicle was attacked and taken over remotely by someone hacking into the vehicle.” A lawyer whose firm handles automotive industry cyber threats undercut any feeling of relief with an observation that judges aren’t savvy about cyber crime on vehicles. I think I’ll stick with my old school car for a while longer.

The Repair Coalition formed to protect the ‘Right to Repair’
Speaking of old school car, I hope I can continue to get it repaired in the future without worrying about lawsuits for copyright violations. We’ve already seen tractor owners in conflict with John Deere over repairs, and exemptions to copyright for repair have been granted only after tedious and costly effort, and then to the farmer only, not to their mechanic. Hence the emergence of The Repair Coalition, which takes aim at repealing the DMCA’s Section 1201 — terms in it make it illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DMCA].”

It’s long been an American ethic to “Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without,” an ethic we need to restore to primacy if we are to reduce our CO2 footprint. Repairing rather than tossing goods is essential to our environmental health, let alone a necessity when wages for lower income workers remain stagnant.

That’s a wrap — I could go on but now we’re better than a day away from Friday. Whew.