August 18, 2023: You can personalize the template message included in the above link, or simply just add your name & email. Seems like it’s US only; please boost if you can’t sign yourself.
“More than 100 days into our strike, as we continue to fight for the sustainability of our profession, events in Washington, D.C. provide an opportunity for writers to shine a light on one of the root causes of the strike: media consolidation.
For decades, the WGA has advocated for stronger antitrust oversight, bringing attention to the ways that mergers and vertical integration in our industry – from AT&T-Time Warner to Warner Bros.-Discovery to Amazon-MGM to Disney-Fox – have consolidated the power of our employers and harmed writers as well as the diversity of content.
In numerous reports and policy filings – including a new report called The New Gatekeepers: How Disney, Amazon and Netflix Will Take Over Media, released yesterday – the WGA has documented the threat to our industry from past and future consolidation and called for more aggressive antitrust enforcement.
Our current strike highlights the urgency of the issue; studios gained power through anti-competitive consolidation and vertical integration and then used that power to push down wages and impose more precarious working conditions for writers while profiting off of their work, and currently – together – refuse to bargain a fair contract for writers to mitigate those harms.
Last month, the FTC and DOJ jointly released proposed revisions to their Merger Guidelines, a policy document designed to guide law enforcement around consolidation. These new Draft Guidelines are part of an effort by these agencies to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. Compared with prior versions of Merger Guidelines, they give significantly more weight to the ways that mergers can be harmful and, for the first time, explicitly direct agencies and courts to consider how mergers can hurt workers.
The Draft Guidelines have been released for public comment, and the FTC and DOJ want to hear from people who have been affected by consolidation – people like you.”
The FTC and DOJ are accepting comments on their revisions of the Merger Guidelines until September 18.
i’ve been thinking about how hard it is to finish creative projects and i have a theory about different types of creative process, which i’m calling sculptor vs weaver theory
when you weave something, it progresses in a linear way. the first row is finished, then the next, and so on. so 10% of the piece is 100% done, then 20% of the piece is 100% done, etc. Parts of the work are totally done before the whole thing is done.
when you sculpt, the entire thing is gradually chipped away at. So 100% of the sculpture is 10% done. Then 100% of the sculpture is 20% done, etc. No part of the work is fully done until all parts are done.
And this is reductive, but if you (I) lean heavily toward the latter process, then it can be really hard to see what the final thing will look like, and it can be hard to show people what you’re going for because you only have vague outlines that gradually get refined painstakingly over time. does this make any sense?
i do consider all of my mutuals to be experts in whatever it is they’re talking about in the moment btw. like you’re absolutely one hundred percent right. i’ve managed to find the only correct people on the internet.
