economics

Hollywood Is Brokener. Or something

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Lynda Obst has an excerpt from her new book on how Hollywood is broken, which follows what we’ve been discussing here.  The excerpt alone is informative and paints a workable theory about risk-adverse Hollywood since you can’t plan easily in an age where balance sheet reliables have suddenly shifted.

As the resident Career Guru here (I also think of myself as the resident sex symbol, but that’s my own delusion), I’d also note something else – Hollywood exerts an irrational pull on other careers.  How many gamers base ideas on blockbusters made for balance sheets, how many writers operate under the delusion they want to write some big film, how many people want to be in the industry peripherally?  If it’s melting down, the impact will be far wider than we expect – and if it’s melting down, some people should ask where they’re getting their ideas from . . .

– Steven

Jaron Lanier on Fixing The Digital Economy

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I don’t always agree with Jaron Lanier, but he has a way of really making you think.  In this case he looks at the  impacts of the digital economy (more specifically, negative ones), and how to fix them.

Jaron Lanier’s “Fixing the Digital Economy.”

It’s an interesting run-up as he looks at the huge data in the economy, and how some existing ideas might be cultivated to help maintain a middle class he fears is being crushed.

– Steven

The Somewhat Clogged Culture Pipeline

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Serdar had responded to my post that we have replaced culture with economics with one of his usual, thoughtful replies. He notes that our technocratic marketing has driven innovation from the marketplace and we are left with what sells, not what necessarily has value, and that to an extent we have a case of this mediocrity infecting us or becoming a kind of cultural pollution. However out of many of his ideas, one thing comes up I want to talk about: the role of The Pipeline.

The Pipeline is how Stuff Gets To Us. There are Pipelines for food, for clothes, and of course for Culture.

When I say The Pipeline, for the sake of this post, I’m talking the media system we have.

The Pipeline that we have are often built of foundations decades, or even centuries old. Publishing houses, radio stations, movie studios, etc. Huge companies and small companies, various suppliers and interests, and so forth came together to create the giant Culture Engine we have now. Some of it is very old, and it often plays it very safe.

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