Sooo hilarious but I can completely see this being a real conversation between streaming execs 😏
(original vid: Asif Ali - instagram - https://tinyurl.com/2p8jpkzz)
“they even put an Indian guy in WandaVision”
hang on a second, I gotta look up something
yeah, this is really funny
Always nice when math helps make it all the more clear how ridiculously reasonable the worker demands are.
This is what the studios have brought everything to a grinding halt for.
They're big mad that they'll have to buy 3 yachts this year instead of four.
i missed this when it happened but. oh my god.
[ID: a tweet by @/mapgar1986 saying,
Every time self taping comes up in SAG- AFTRA discussions I just remember that Lukas Gage clip where an unmuted director complained about having to look at "poor people in their tiny apartments"
/end ID]
[Video Description:
a recording of a self-taped zoom audition. Lukas Gage's screen is pinned, showing him in front of a small section of his apartment as he prepares to deliver his material.
Tristram Shapeero: [not pictured] "These poor people live in these tiny apartments, like, I'm looking at his- y'know, background and he's got his TV, and y'know-" Gage: [pained expression] "Oof, yeah, unmuted-" "I know it's a shitty apartment, that's why- give me this job so I can get a better one." "Alright. Ready?" Shapeero: "Oh my god I am so, so sorry, Lukas- [unintelligible] I'm so sorry." Gage: [overlapping, jokingly] "No, it's totally-" "Listen, I'm living in a 4x4 box, it's fine, just give me the job and we'll be fine." Shapeero: "No I'm- I'm mortified." [overlapping a burst of awkward laughter from another participant]
/ End Video Description]
Advertising is an incredibly wasteful, ecologically destructive industry that intrudes on our everyday lives pretty much constantly. We’re absolutely fucked if we can’t even question one of the most distinctly obnoxious and useless facets of the ecocidal economic system we live in. Like this isn’t even something that powers our day-to-day existence like the energy sector (literally killing us but also keeping our AC/heat, transportation, etc running)—advertising just pollutes, wastes, and annoys, yet it’s been assimilated into many peoples’ sense of self and their ability to “enjoy things”
Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintaining planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is these that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that in a society freed from capitalism “being” will be valued over “having.” Personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and products—the sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve the fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
Advertising pollutes the mental landscape, just like it does the urban and rural landscapes; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.
Ecosocialism, Michael Löwy
i learned this from reading Galbraith: advertisements for products drive up consumption behaviors for all related products. You see an ad for Coca-Cola and you're that much more likely to go out and get yourself any kind of soda. "That much more likely" isn't much, people aren't that impressionable, but the effect spread out among millions of people is enough to make it worth companies' money. The issue with it is ultimately that the levels of consumption of consumer products in our society are not sustainable, the infrastructure doesn't exist and maybe can't exist for it to be particularly efficient, so sustaining the levels of demands for every product that advertising means companies depend on = vast stockpiles of perfectly useful goods left to rot in the desert somewhere in the global south, or worse set on fire somewhere in the global south.
And late capitalism has settled on rate of growth in profits as a bellwether of economic health for firms! The current unsustainable level isn't even enough for them, they want to see us eating and drinking garbage until we choke & dumping half of the riches of the earth into a hole for their private benefit.
The consumptive affluence we live with doesn't make us happy, it isn't who we are, it's just something the number wants, so we dedicate startling amounts of our lives to it. If you wanted to start making a dent in the outsized role the global north plays in climate change, you could honestly do worse than severely restricting or even outright banning advertising spending
#i was reading about Disney's had few years (so few films of theirs have madenover $1b lately! sob)#and one of the upshots is they might have to choose to cut back on their advertising budget which is like $100 million each for big films#it would be very nice to see less of that but also#i think they'd just find workarounds by manipulating folk into viral marketing#but they will have to be really against the wall to push thst more
Don’t forget the first victims when you go see Oppenheimer this opening weekend. Unforgivable not to include them in the narrative.
We love us some Nolan and Cillian but this is also a story that should never have taken place.
For further reading:
This is what happens when the US government goes nuclear-crazy during the Cold War and mines a shit ton of uranium. Lambs born with three legs and no eyes, and human stillbirths and agonizing deformities for those that survive. For decades it was referred to as a Navajo-specific hereditary illness. No one made the link to the mines and the drinking water.
The atomic bomb's explosion is pink. Death is now fabulous, and there is a sense of camp that removes the terror from a weapon that can destroy humanity.
hell is empty and all the devils are here
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn't make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you're being snobbish or condescending when you're just trying to be specific
What I did not expect from oppenheimer was the genuine guffaws that I and several of my friends had throughout the film but especially during the first use of "I am become death" (hint...there is sex involved) and magically appearing Einstein. Did Nolan...did he know?
Straight after seeing Barbie I was on the bus seeing a group of women dressed in tennis outfits on a night out walking past a homeless man who was talking to a crusty punk dude who had bought him a pizza. And I was thinking of how the film had such a shallow view of the patriarchy, and how it just talked about "mothers and their daughters" and my gender discontent with the whole thing (also, no queer Barbies? Of course not, though Kens get a flicker of it) and I just tried to think of the kind punk and let the softly rainy air draw in the human.
I'm still processing but like. Raise boys and girls the same and make room for those who aren't either.
what is it with drunk young men taking a shine to some knitwear I have on? it's only happened twice but both times were marked by a respect for the art of knitting, taking time to mention how this work of grannies and others should be held in awe
I have an end-of-life patient to whom I spoke today. She burst out laughing and said, "It was all such fun. I just had so much fun." I wish this for everyone. I wish that we each would meet death laughing, with little regret and even less fear.
Sorry I'm late, I got added to the Wild Hunt last night and ran and reveled with them for what felt like 100 years plus a day until I landed the killing blow on a stag with bronze antlers then suddenly woke in my bed, willow leaves in my hair, a nameless song echoing in my ears, and my hands still bloody, so yeah, totally missed my alarm and stuff.
10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
AAAND WE HAVE LIFTOFF!