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Podcast Episode Notes: The Culture Journalist - "How Culture Internalized the Logic of the Stock Market"
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Culture Journalist*, hosts Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick engage with Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, to explore the pervasive influence of financialization on contemporary entertainment. Their discussion centers around deWaard's book, *Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture*, which examines how the entertainment industry has become increasingly derivative and financially driven.
Key Concepts and Themes
Financialization of Culture
- Wall Street's Influence: The episode argues that the entertainment industry's obsession with franchises, reboots, and derivative content is driven by Wall Street's financial interests rather than pure audience demand.
- Private Equity and Hedge Funds: The discussion highlights the role of private equity firms and activist hedge funds in purchasing entertainment companies and exerting influence on their creative output.
Derivative Media
- Definition: Derivative media refers to works that are not original but instead rely on pre-existing intellectual property (IP). This includes sequels, remakes, and adaptations.
- Financial Instruments: DeWaard connects the concept of derivative media to financial instruments like derivatives, suggesting that just as these financial contracts trade on attributes rather than the underlying asset, cultural products increasingly reflect similar attributes.
Impact on Creative Labor
- Wage Suppression: The financial strategies employed by entertainment companies lead to a precarious labor environment for creatives, resulting in lower wages and job insecurity.
- Risk Aversion: DeWaard argues that a focus on financial returns discourages innovative and risky storytelling, as companies prefer to invest in established IP rather than original stories.
Cultural Consolidation
- Geographical Concentration: DeWaard maps the influence of major financial and media hubs, highlighting how Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Manhattan serve as the epicenters for the financialization of culture.
- Asset Management Dominance: The episode emphasizes the growing power of asset management firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, which increasingly own significant stakes in media companies, limiting competition and diversity in cultural production.
Case Studies
- Cultural Texts as Financial Assets: The conversation touches on specific cultural products such as hip-hop lyrics, 30 Rock, and The Matrix, analyzing how they incorporate financial elements and commentary within their narratives.
- Satire and Self-Awareness: DeWaard points out that some cultural works, while embedded in financial logic, also critique the system, serving a dual purpose of entertainment and social commentary.
Key Takeaways
- Cultural Products as Financial Instruments: The integration of financial strategies into the creative process leads to a culture that prioritizes profit over originality, with significant implications for the type of content produced.
- Need for Regulatory Change: DeWaard advocates for antitrust reforms and policies that would enable a more diverse and competitive entertainment industry, breaking down the monopolistic tendencies of powerful firms.
- Critical Financial Literacy: Understanding how financial systems operate is crucial for both creators and consumers, as awareness can lead to more informed decisions about the content they engage with and support.
Conclusion In this episode of *The Culture Journalist*, the conversation provides a critical lens on how the financialization of culture shapes the entertainment landscape, impacting creativity, labor conditions, and the types of stories that are told. DeWaard presents a compelling argument for the need to rethink our relationship with both culture and capital, highlighting the potential for media to challenge and reshape societal narratives.
For more insights, the full episode is available on [The Culture Journalist Substack](https://theculturejournalist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Why are we making the Kool-Aid movie? a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. So it's become something of a cliche that whenever something new comes out, a movie, a TV series, a song, it's actually just a rehashed version of something old. Franchises, reboots, live action remakes, covers, samples. These days, at least in mainstream pop culture, it feels like there's no escaping the uroboros of IP. But why is that? A couple of reasons might come to mind. A common refrain among people in the industry is that that's just what audiences want. I mean, 8 out of 10 of the highest-grossing films of all time are either sequels or franchises.
1:12So why wouldn't people want a Minecraft movie? Or maybe it's just that telling stories that have already been market-tested is a more reliable way for studios to hedge against loss amid a really precarious media landscape and shortening attention spans. But the real reason, according to Andrew DeWard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, is Wall Street. In his fascinating and brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media, How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, less visible sense. From private equity companies buying up portfolios full of songs to activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, the culture industries have quite literally been gobbled up by the financial sector.
2:03Derivatives, as in the financial instrument, included. And that wave of financialization is operating as a kind of invisible hand, determining what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix. not just on the level of the kinds of works that actually get funded, but increasingly in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit beguilingly that, quote, the stock exchange has become embedded within the media text. Andrew joins us to explain how finance world strategies, like stock buybacks and equities trading, impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it.
2:44We also get into the lesser-known ways that entertainment companies actually make their money, and why it's become so incompatible with taking risks on their cultural output. And we talk about how the logic of the derivative have become embedded in these outputs themselves, from Jay-Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to 30 Rock's Outback Steakhouse references, to the White Lotus casting K-pop star Lisa in the role of Mook. We'll be right back with Andrew just after the break. A bad cover version of love is not the real thing
3:26Bikini-clad girl on the front who invited you in The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. If this pod had something meaningful to your life and you want to access everything we put out, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our sub stack. Paid subscribers receive access to our Discord community, the Cujoplex, full access to bonus episodes, and more goodies. Our bonus eps are where we get personal and experimental. Recent ones have included a conversation with Brandon Hagen of Vundabar about what it's like to have your indie band randomly blow up on TikTok.
4:09an oral essay by Emily revisiting her former years as a Kim's video clerk, and a conversation with Teddy Brown about the unseen algorithms actually running our world. You can get it all right now by subscribing over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Hey guys, we're back with Andrew DeWard. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. Happy to be here. So you opened the book with this very compelling way of summing up the forces that are, you know, quietly shaping music, film, and television. that we consume, and you even point to them on a map. What are the geographical areas that you point to, and what institutions are they home to?
4:49Yes, thank you. So attempting in the book to kind of place you in this story with this particular landscape, and I have three maps. They are Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. So I suggest, you know, imagine yourself on the Santa Monica Pier. You could drive down Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, and then get on the 101 and you will pass by the headquarters of nearly all the powerful media companies in the world, whether it's film or television or music. So that's, you know, Disney, Fox, Sony, Netflix, Universal Music Group, all kinds of these companies. Right.
5:23But then I suggest, you know, continue on the 101 up to the Silicon Valley. You'll pass by most of the big tech companies, Apple, Facebook, etc. And then you turn on to this one road called Sand Hill Road. And actually, a lot of the venture capital companies are all in this one little part of Silicon Valley. Now, from there, take a flight to New York City and go a single address on the Upper East Side. And you'd see most of the key financial players, a lot of private equity companies in this one place, or at least in this one section. And so this is to say, you know, the book is a story about one boulevard in Los Angeles, one patch of freeway that stretches from LA County to San Francisco, one address in Manhattan.
6:04and as I write how the cultural lifeblood of a country has been spilled on these streets by a rogues gallery of financial villainy. So I'm attempting to tell this story. It's kind of complicated. In one way, there's these characters, you know, asset managers, private equity firms, corporate venture capitalists, hedge fund analysts, derivatives traders. But it's also kind of a simple story in that this is where all the money goes. And you've noticed that the cultural industries have been lacking in a particular way in the past couple decades. My book is going to suggest to you that it's Wall Street's fault.
6:37Wall Street has been extracting value and devouring culture, as I say. I feel like the map that was least expected was the New York one. Being a New York City music journalist for over a decade, I never went up to that building. What is the building? Yeah, it's 9 West 57th Street. So it's just Olo building, S-O-L-O-W. Overlook Central Park, sometimes called Billionaire's Row. It's actually kind of a misnomer when I say Wall Street, because Wall Street is much further south in Manhattan. A lot of the financial concentration actually exists closer to Central Park. But many firms, Tiger Global Management, Apollo, D1 Capital Partners, Elliott Management, Providence, KKR were there in the past, Silver Lake was there in the past.
7:25It's kind of like the least talked about and most shadowy of the institutions that you talk about. Right. Yeah. It just really pointed out like how much more consolidated the media industries are than we probably have a sense of. It's just very interesting to realize that they form their own kind of triangle of sadness, if you will here. Yeah. The attempt with the map is to that exact suggestion. Like it feels extremely diverse and full of variety, the media industries, you turn on Netflix or Spotify or anything media related feels like there's so much. That is true to one degree, right? To a certain degree, there's more film, television and music made than ever before.
8:05On the other hand, the control of that vast torrent of cultural production is increasingly consolidated. And we can look at the headquarters of film and TV and music. That's certainly a really important aspect of the consolidation. But then what I'm trying to get at in this book is behind them, where's that even further consolidation and control happening? Well, it's these particular types of financial firms. And so the map sort of gets at that point, like it's really all right here. The money is all pooling in one place, almost kind of physically the trillions of dollars that cycle through these types of financial firms.
8:43Let's get at the term that's at the heart of the book, which is derivative media. The term makes a very intuitive kind of sense in our current era of endless remakes and sequels and spinoffs of pre-existing IP. But what are some other ways in which the idea of derivative feels relevant to understanding the contemporary culture industries? Yeah. So there's a double meaning at the heart of the book and the concept of derivative media. And the one that you mentioned, yeah, just endless remakes, sequels, spinoffs, etc. We know what that feels like. And then the other, you know, clear meaning of derivative is this financial instrument.
9:20You know, a derivative is a sort of a contract, like a future or a forward or an option, a swap. Or if you short a company, right, you're engaging in derivatives. It's an instrument to hedge or like exploit risk. But the key thing is that derivatives are about prices. They are not about the thing itself, right? So they dismantled an asset into individual attributes, and then you can trade them without trading the asset itself. And so this is like a key component of our now, you know, speculative political economy. You may recall, depending on your age, the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, that was not because of bad mortgages.
9:59That was part of it. But bad mortgages should not tank a global economy. The bad mortgages were securitized, the credit ratings for them were corrupted, the banks were leveraging them and putting them into all these complicated financial instruments. And there was the kind of trickle down effect of like, as the mortgages started to fall, the contagion within this system was so much wider than it should have been. And so derivatives are, you know, kind of the vehicle by which that happened. And, you know, it's hard to overestimate how big this derivatives market is now. I think I have a comparison that the quote real world economy, world GDP is around 100 trillion, but the derivatives market is about 600 trillion.
10:46These are trades in like every conceivable direction. And this is increasingly like shaping the market as opposed to just reflecting it. People are using it as insurance. They're not hedging bets. They're really speculating with derivatives. So that was the intent of the book was like, oh, these two things, to quote Fargo, maybe they're, you know, connected. The derivative content that we see and the derivative financial instrument, those are very much connected in my view. So I'm looking at the financialization of the cultural industries, how derivatives are both a literal thing that Disney traders do, but also derivative as a logic that you'd like unpack and dismantle assets into little attributes that you trade.
11:29And that's about pricing mechanisms rather than, you know, how culture would have worked in the past as a sort of distinct product. So that's the like two sides is like there's this financial instrument and then there's this textual phenomenon. And those are what motivated the project. But as I kept digging into this over 10 years, found out that there's actually a bunch of meanings for derivatives that are important here as well. And so a derivative is also a legal right. Like when you negotiate over intellectual property, you really want the derivative rights, the opportunity to take a story or a character and rework them into lots of different types of stories, different formats, different products, maybe for different demographics.
12:07So all those franchises and remakes and interpolations and samples and music, all this requires good lawyers, right? And so not new, adapting and reworking old content has a very long history. It's also not inherently bad, right? There's lots of great new stories and songs made from older ones, But the degree to that is much higher today. And I would say, you know, connected to these financial and legal processes. So that's a third aspect. We also have derivative as a, you know, a common complaint. It's like a qualitative evaluation of the fact that our popular culture is constantly just cheap copies of something else.
12:44And that we have yet another version of Batman, yet another remake, yet another song off an old one. And so that sort of subjective feeling of constantly remaking and reliving the past, this sort of like predominance of nostalgia is another way we can think about derivative media. And then with the scale of what I have outlined and sort of traced historically, I argue that it's basically the new era is derivative media. So maybe around the late 90s, early aughts, with the increase of this financialization, we have derivative media as a historical period. And there's particular things we could talk about.
13:24You know, the zero interest rate periods when it was really cheap to borrow money is a big part of this. So I say it's a kind of periodizing claim driven by the dominance of financial firms. The American cultural industries are in this new era starting around the turn of the century in which derivative media takes hold. And finally, and I know we'll talk about this later with 30 Rock and hip hop, but there's also, I think, a sort of subversive, potentially subversive aspect to some of this derivative media, which is that these kind of cultural texts that reckon with the financial era, they use satire.
13:59they use intertextuality, they are like lyrical games. It can kind of educate its audience about derivative media. And that's why I've chosen kind of interesting case studies. And we can talk more about that. Yeah, your use of the matrix, like kind of made my head spin a little bit because it's like, exactly what you just said is also what the matrix is about. But then the matrix became this example of like these predatory for Yeah, it's interesting. So you write that in In the story of capitalism and media told here, the big corporations that dominate the cultural industries are themselves mere minnows in an ocean with much bigger predators.
14:35This is a really important point because, you know, most of the reporting that we see on the entertainment business tends to focus on, you know, the moves being made by the big three record labels or the DSPs or streamers like Netflix. not the financial players who are kind of quietly operating and cutting deals with them behind the scenes. You don't have to like name all of them, but what are some of the different types of predators you examine in the book? And what are some of their weapons? And where have we seen them show up in the contemporary music and film TV industries? Yeah, sure. So I'll launch into the biggest predator that you increasingly hear about, but it is still kind of confusing, perhaps, which are these so-called asset managers.
15:19So BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, enormous investment firms. BlackRock has$10 trillion under management, this ungodly sum of money. It doesn't have all that money. It is investing it for others, but that's a huge amount of power and control, right? So an asset manager is this organization that pools capital to manage assets on others' behalf. It might be a pension fund. It might be a endowment fund, It might be your retirement fund. It might be various institutions who have sort of outsourced their investment abilities to these big asset managers. So in 1950 or so, institutional investors went from owning for about 7 % of the U.S.
16:03stock market, and now it's nearly 70 % today. So it's just this huge consolidated control. And one of the major difficulties or potentially destructive aspects of asset management companies is what's known as horizontal shareholding or common ownership. And this is because they are so big and they are buying equity stakes in so many companies on behalf of others that they just start to build huge chunks of every company across an industry. And so like, you know, the big airlines, the big tech companies, they have 15, 20 % ownership by these same three companies. And that's the same with media, right?
16:41So I tracked, you know, Disney, Netflix, Sony, Comcast, others in music as well. And it's yeah, it slowly ticked up 5, 10, 15. Now it's 20 % or so owned by asset managers. And so, you know, imagine if your biggest investors is all the same company, then why would companies compete with each other, right? So they're incentivized to keep prices high, wages low, competition to a minimum. And this is certainly the case in media. And so you look at something like the way that wages have been suppressed or the way that ticket prices continually go up well beyond consumer inflation. So that's a big one.
17:19Asset managers. Another big one would be hedge funds, which are kind of a recent phenomenon. They were deregulated in 1996 and then exploded into this investment type that manages nearly five trillion dollars now. You'd hear of them, you know, hedge funds like Elliott, Renaissance, Anchorage, Citadel. Unlike an asset management fund that is slowly building up huge stakes in companies over the long run, hedge funds are much more quickly investing and selling and trying to achieve a higher rate of return for their investors through particular strategies. And a key one that has been really dangerous for cultural industries are these so-called hedge fund activists.
17:59They used to be known as corporate raiders, but they pressure companies to increase cash flow and extract it. So I'll give one pertinent example. You may recall AT &T bought Time Warner. It didn't go so well. They eventually split it off and merged it with Discovery. And so now we have this, you know, Warner Discovery mismanaged media firm. But it came about because AT &T, you know, spent a lot of money, went into, you know, took on a lot of debt to acquire this company. But then it was a hedge fund, Elliott Management, who took a$3 billion position in AT &T and then released this widely publicized letter.
18:35And they just told the company what to do. They were like, we need you to divest certain assets. We need you to fire your CEO. So it was a mistake that you bought Time Warner and DirecTV. And then they demanded a lot of layoffs. And the company did all of that, right? It was threatened by this hedge fund activist who gathered other hedge funds to take part in it. They call it a wolf pack. And they successfully had 42 ,000 employees fired. They had the CEO fired. They increased the dividends and stock buybacks. That's like a particular type of weapon where companies are returning money to their shareholders in different ways.
19:10And so, yeah, this was, you know, a hedge fund activist who had a tremendous impact on the cultural industries. You're likely aware that, you know, Warner Discovery has canceled this Looney Tunes movie, has since like gotten rid of Looney Tunes completely from Max, the streaming service, canceled the Catwoman or Catgirl movie, has done all kinds of nefarious things to its company. This is because it's constantly being disciplined by these various types of financial investment. wasn't there just that like recently the proxy war there was the activist investor who was trying to basically come for disney to make it less woke yeah exactly yeah so that is exactly the same type of process here and yeah they're like why do we need all these different comic book characters in different genders people of color and thought he would impose his view on disney attempt to discipline the company that way in that case i don't think that they completely reconfigured the company like they hoped, but they did profit from that whole proxy battle.
20:12And that is generally the case that the hedge fund managers are successful in at least extracting more from it, if not, you know, totally overhauling it. And it's important to think of the sort of battles that occur in boardrooms like this. You have the CEO who has a particular type of strategy to increase They're bottom line, but they're constantly on the lookout for hedge fund activists, proxy battles, mergers and acquisitions that are not always agreed upon. Right. Sort of these leveraged buyouts. Yeah. The financial shenanigans that occur at this level are having tremendous effect on the film and TV and music that we engage with.
20:53Yeah. Another thing that we've talked about previously on this podcast is private equity. Obviously, you mentioned leveraged buyouts where a private equity company will sort of purchase a company and then the company will end up in massive debt to the people who purchased it. Correct. Or to itself. To itself. Yeah, that's the strangest thing about this whole process. How is this legal? But yeah, you're correct. The private equity firm like Bain or KKR, TPG, Blackstone, there's this kind of investment fund. Unlike asset managers where they are slowly building up a huge stake and unlike hedge funds that are like kind of quickly moving in and out of companies, a private equity firm is going to buy a company outright and it has this like five or 10 year investment fund.
21:42And so it has to return profits to those investors in a five or 10 year period. But they're not just buying stakes of a company. They're buying the whole thing. But how do you buy an enormous company like Warner Music Group? And so they will raise a bunch of money from investors, but also they'll get a bunch of like leverage debt from banks. But then they'll charge that debt to the company they are buying. And so the company owes that debt. How is this not a conflict of interest? I don't know. Why is this still legal? I don't know. To be honest, looking back at one of the ways this happens is called the carried interest loophole.
22:17And in fact, every politician has said they will remove it. Going back, that includes Trump, Biden, Barack Obama. They've all said, oh, this is an easy thing for us to raise a bunch of money and get rid of a predatory practice. But once they're elected, then private equity firms, lobbyists come to town and they're like, are you sure you want to do that? We give you millions of dollars or we could give your opponents millions of dollars. How about we leave that loophole there, right? And so it has maintained for many years because of that. But yeah, they buy out the company using debt that they saddle to the company themselves, which is why it's so difficult to recover from a private equity firm buyout.
22:53Examples in media include, yeah, like I said, Warner Music Group, but others Regal and Ames as theater chains. There's MGM, Legendary, and DreamWorks Studios. There's labels like Warner Music and EMI, radio networks like iHeart Media and Cumulus. They've all gone through pretty devastating private equity takeovers that results in dramatic layoffs and restructuring and ends up with further consolidation, right? So famously, a private equity firm just like destroyed EMI, which at the time was like one of the biggest music labels in the world. And afterwards, it just got sold for parts. And so part of it went to Sony and part of it went to Universal.
23:31So we went from four big labels down to three. Similarly, with theater chains, with studios, we're getting further consolidation because of private equity mismanagement. You know, they're saddling companies with debt. They're profiting themselves because they can just keep paying themselves dividends and fees. But the outcome is rarely good for the actual company or let alone good for like creative production. Yeah, Andrea and I, I don't know if we've like directly talked about this, but Andrea and I experienced this firsthand. We met while working for Vice Media, which took like a huge hundreds of millions of dollars investment from TPG, I think back in 2017, like major private equity company.
24:12And, you know, we directly experienced the, you know, yearly rounds of layoffs and, you know, going from working along hundreds or thousands of colleagues to almost nobody left there now. And I, funnily enough this week started receiving what used to be the vice newsletter like showcasing the stories of the week i've been getting this week over and over again these like weird sponsored emails that are for like weed gummies or something and then when i clicked the link it was saying that it was like an untrustworthy site oh yes just just a little comic like this whole phenomenon of like big media brands getting zombified like that like it's just they're just throwing the vice brand around but it has like nothing to do with the cultural media institution that it used to be and um i know you lived in la andrew like we saw the same thing happen with la weekly basically yeah yeah totally right vice is a great example la weekly there's so many i have a list of at least 40 companies that have gone through this process and yeah it's devastating for any company but it's particularly egregious for media companies, right, that are not based, you can't milk more from them, you can't streamline them.
25:30You need journalists, you need writers, you need people that can do the work of creativity or journalism or whatnot, right? But these financial firms see it as something like, oh, we'll use our magical consulting powers and streamline this, make it more profitable. It never works out. And it is really devastating for the public sphere, for creativity, for culture. Yeah. And you discuss this wide range of different financial instruments and institutions in the book. You've mentioned some of them, you know, stock buybacks, private equity, derivatives trading. Taken as a whole, though, when we see this sort of financialization occurring, what are some common trends in, you know, how it impacts the people who are making culture and the culture we consume?
26:21Yes. You know, so as much as possible, I try to keep the focus on labor, right? We have to discuss these larger instruments, the larger weapons or strategies they use, but I'm always trying to bring it back to the workers and the experiences they have as a result of this. And yeah, it's like almost uniformly negative. It's tremendous amounts of wage suppression, precarious working conditions, little security. We saw this with the writers and actors strike, the kind of experiences that those workers are having, and that this is, I would argue, downstream from the larger financial extraction that's going on.
27:04And so there's a kind of hollowing out of the companies themselves. And thus the effect is felt by workers. So one way to think about it is, yeah, the deteriorating conditions for creative labor within the cultural industries. That's one big trend. Another would be to look at the companies, what's happened to them. And so they are more and more competing over scale and market power. it's not competition to see who can you know make the best movie uh earn the most accolades have the most you know beloved franchise or tv show uh it's about achieving market power achieving scale especially the move to streaming right where the incentives are to get you to keep subscribing to let that 9.99 or 14.99 or whatever continue to come out of your bank account each month That's not an incentive to create enjoyable things, to create niche products that people love.
28:09It's an incentive to achieve market power and prevent anyone else from being able to offer something comparable. it's about owning a big catalog and we've lost so much in that move to streaming there was obvious convenience from doing that there was a certain interest in like oh binge watching or on demand all these things yeah it's so convenient uh but the actual financial model behind it incentivizes market power so you see that with the kind of things that are produced within a system like that, right? You want bigger and bigger hits. You want a Taylor Swift size tour. You don't want lots and lots of artists doing lots and lots of tours.
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28:52You want to put everything into a few huge products. Obviously, we see that with franchise films. The studios used to make hundreds of movies a year. Now they make a handful and put so much marketing money, so much budget into, you know effects that cost so much they want to scare away any competitor they want to achieve market power they don't want to compete week to week over you know who has the most beloved film or in the case of record labels is it kind of like uh obviously you know they do want the taylor swifts of the world but is it also a case of just like absorbing up as much ip as they possibly can at any one time so they have like stronger negotiating power and just like if you have all of the world's IP then it's almost like a like a portfolio of trades.
29:45Yeah absolutely right and yeah that's why I mentioned catalog like it's making sure you get the next Taylor Swift but it's also more so about that scale of the catalog that is so immense that you're just profiting from every tiny little fraction of a penny. We see huge purchases in the hundreds of millions of dollars for just, you know, one artist and their copyright catalog, you know, the recording and or publishing rights to their music. And there have been some new financial firms. Hypnosis was one. It has recently sort of stumbled and been bought out by its big investor, BlackRock. And And some of these firms are trying to do things with copyright catalogs.
30:27But to be honest, it's still the same big three that are making the biggest purchases and who I think will end up with those catalogs anyway, even if there's a bit of like financial speculation as to them right now. The biggest is, you know, I think it was Bruce Springsteen. It was five or six hundred million. And that was, I believe, Universal, one of the big three, Universal, Warner or Sony. so they are assembling or continue to assemble these massive catalogs and so it's you know impossible to compete if you're a smaller company you really are just the research and development arm of those big companies even if you don't have a specific relationship very rarely does a musician achieve a certain sense of scale and then not get subsumed by one of the three big companies Now, I say research and development kind of purposefully.
31:18That is another aspect, another of the big financial strategies that I'm looking at, which is corporate venture capital. And so that relationship can be informal or very formalized where big companies have their own venture capital arm and they're making hundreds of investments in little startups, hoping to catch the next big one, but also do that research and development and find the new audiences, find the new behaviors that consumers are interested in, find the new technologies. And so much of that just feeds back into those same big companies. Corporate venture capital is another way that they can maintain control, maintain market power.
32:02You know, a common view of entertainment is as a high risk industry where, you know, labels or production companies place these bets on individual works. Those individual works compete in an open market, struggle for prominence, and the most successful ones rise to the top. And that in turn helps to cover the cost of those bets that didn't work out, right? You call this explanation a myth. And you've just talked about how entertainment companies are actually making their money. Why do the specific ways they make their money seem to be less and less compatible with taking actual big risks in terms of the culture that they're funding.
32:41Yeah. So, you know, I say it's a myth as in anything about the social order we have. We've made it a particular way and we could make it a different way. There's nothing natural about having to have a few big companies that have this tremendous amount of power and control. We have had regulations in the past and we could have them again in the future that maintains competition or that at least maintains, you know, more variety and diversity. But we aren't right. And so there's nothing inherent about entertainment being a high risk industry. Yeah, sure. There's not everything that is made is going to be a hiss, but that does not equal the fact that there should only then be a few companies because of how difficult it is.
33:28not at all and yeah again we we can just have the kind of regulations that say you don't get to have this um amount of power you can only have this amount of the market more so i think we just need to stop companies from being able to participate in so many different sectors right they build a monopoly but then they use that monopoly to get into other sectors obviously big tech companies are the you know most guilty of this but it's in entertainment as well and just like film and television used to be separate cable tv and network tv used to be separate home entertainment market international market there used to be just so much sort of firewalls between where you could compete and now we're just like yeah sure have at a disney be in all of those markets and so that's one regulation uh that would produce a far more healthy ecosystem let's say for entertainment in.
34:21And yeah, you know, since we are allowing this kind of power to be used, we end up with companies that are, you know, far less willing to take big risks because, yeah, you know, why take a risk on an original story when you can release the 50th version of Batman that, you know, people will go to because that's all that's available. Right. So they have fashioned the market in a particular way where people are sort of trained or shaped into thinking this is the kind of media they like oh this reminds me of my childhood you know uh if you're a disney fan or into comic books or video games are now like kind of the most important ip uh in hollywood um yeah i enjoy that thing let's enjoy it some more let's continually do the same thing uh that is about scale.
35:12That's about saving marketing costs. That's about training viewers to think about entertainment in a particular way. But it hasn't always been like that. And we could return to having more original, more radical, more local, more diverse, more variety. All these things could easily be sort of advocated for and even incentivized with how you structure an industry. There's nothing natural about how a economy works. There's only the regulations and rules that we, as a society, agree to be the baseline aspects of the political economy, right? it's a democracy, then we get to decide what those rules are.
35:53I believe that we should be exercising that democratic right to shape our cultural industries to, you know, employ more people, create more original, local, radical, independent stories and songs. We can do all that one way or the first step might be to get rid of this myth that it's somehow just like natural, who is the most popular within the entertainment industry. That's just not the case. Yeah, it's like a myth that it's just this like open market struggle for like, you know, Darwinian struggle where the best media is the media that rises to the top when like every aspect of the market is like owned by the same handful of companies who are shaping things in their favor.
36:34Right. Exactly. Yeah. If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.
37:13You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. I was just thinking about too, like how much is what we were just discussing, like, because of the attention economy that we're in now, because of that and because of these technological shifts that have like helped foster as being in an attention economy? Or is it more the other way around? Yeah, I guess there's attention economy could be defined in a few different ways. But if are we talking mostly about, say, shifts to spending more time on social media or are we talking about general availability of leisure time and how we spend that leisure time?
38:03More the former. Like, I'm just thinking of like the way that audience value is extracted via attention has been so it's so much more diffuse. Like I think of it as like more lateral and small, you know, the whole phenomenon of like meet your audience where they're at versus before it was just I don't know. I just I think a lot about how the safety of IP feels like it has emerged sort of concurrently with the fact that our attention spans are shorter because there is there are so many more places that content is being thrown at us or that our attention is being extracted from. I don't know if I'm totally like articulating my point here.
38:42well. Yeah, no, that makes sense, right? And we are thinking more about, say, big tech companies and social media and their version of content being very different, that it's very fragmented, very diffuse, and that there's certain psychological strategies being used to make that engagement be kind of addicting in various ways. Yeah, that's a different approach. And there's also certainly a generational difference here. You folks who want sort of lots of little content as opposed to longer form stories, let's say, like film and television. And yeah, there's so many factors here to think about the shift in those types of content and attention.
39:26And one thing I will mention that we should not forget, let's say, is labor, right? And so like, why would Google that owns YouTube put so much emphasis on this type of mode of attention and mode of technological fragmented content. Well, they don't have to pay anyone, right? And this user generated model of content has been successful, not just because of those psychological or technological means, but because they have this huge advantage of having people work for free for them on one hand. And on the other hand, been sort of exploiting music for such a long time. And so YouTube, if you're unfamiliar with how that works rights wise, is that if you are a musician or a label that owns that music and you're unhappy with the fact that someone has uploaded it to YouTube, you can file a claim to YouTube and maybe they'll get to it at some point and take it down.
40:22But really, it'll just get re-uploaded again constantly. Right. So your ability to actually use the takedown method at YouTube is very compromised. On the other hand, you can say to YouTube, OK, fine, license it. I'll take the tiniest little fraction of a penny that comes from having an ad beside it. So YouTube sort of like blackmailed or used their power in a particular way to get so much music at a bargain cost. Right. having to share a little bit of their advertising money versus actually licensing it like Spotify and Apple Music do is, you know, vastly different. And so the worst place for music getting remunerated properly is YouTube.
41:06So, you know, YouTube has this exploitative model for music. It has this exploitative model for content creators. And where did that end up? It's now estimated$600 billion company. That's not unrelated from its labor costs. So when we think about film and television and popular music and the way that they have changed over the years, a lot of it is thinking about its financial structure and its labor costs. And so much of these big financial predators are like, lower your labor costs at all means. Like you get to have McKinsey come in to do consulting for you. Some guy with a slide deck who's like, fire more people, get rid of your pensions, do all these things.
41:51But they're now competing with YouTube, competing with TikTok, where the actual share of labor costs is minute, right? And, you know, competitively that when it comes to the attention economy, when it comes to producing content or media culture, right, it's just so difficult to compete with. So that's why you get far less willing to take risks on original content or original screenplays on sort of weird music, you know, you're competing with the price of YouTube, which is nothing. Maybe somewhat related to this attention economy question, or at least I can see some ways in which they might be related.
42:29You write, and this is one of my favorite lines in the book, that the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text. Where do we see finance industry tactics or, you know, sort of forms of financial risk management showing up in how contemporary media products themselves are constructed. Right. So thanks for this question. And we talked earlier about, you know, derivative in the sense of sequels, reboots, samples, you know, endlessly recreating things as cheap copies of the past. That's one aspect of it. But a sort of deeper aspect of derivative media in my mind is that the media text is full of references now to other media texts.
43:09So it's pretty common that you were experiencing one media product, but it's actually full of hundreds or thousands of other things. So this might be the sample of another song. It might be a joke about another text. It might be a product placement. It might be an homage. All these different ways of including other media texts within a media text. And I argue that this is actually a financial process, not just a textual process. In literature studies, this was called intertextuality. the idea that every, you know, novel, every piece of writing is sort of a, you know, amalgamation of everything the author has read in their life.
43:45And whether that's conscious or unconscious or explicit or implicit, we are sort of building cultural texts out of other ones, right? But this is now a sort of financial process where if you are 30 Rock, as one of my examples is, you're Tina Fey, you've worked at Sour Night Live, you've worked under this NBC Universal powerful Comcast behemoth. You start to embed that within the text itself. You're constantly making references to other NBC products. You're also doing product placements. Some of them are joked about, some of them aren't. They don't joke about the fact that they have an ongoing relationship with Apple, for instance.
44:19Apple does not take kindly to people making fun of them. But, you know, Outback Steakhouse will happily be joked about, right? So there's lots of these different pricing relationships happening. And so, yeah, I think about this as the stock exchange being embedded within the media text. All kinds of different relationships that might seem kind of benign, but are actually new opportunities for profit. And whether that's explicitly a product placement or the potential for one. I also look at hip hop lyrics and yeah, you talk about alcohol, you talk about luxury automobiles. Some of those are legit relationships or they're attempting to create one.
44:57And so sometimes Cavassier goes back to Busta Rhymes after and is like, Like how about you be our, what do they call it? Like brand layout or whatever. We'll have an actual relationship. But at first it's not necessarily done that way. Jay-Z, of course, has done lots of interesting investment work behind the scenes while in his lyrics actually using the names of the products that he has a relationship with. So there's all kinds of different pricing mechanisms, different opportunities being sort of innovated within cultural texts. And then part of my job was to track that over many years and just show the scale of it.
45:35And now that it's in the thousands or tens of thousands, then there's so many more opportunities there. And that's when I start to think of it as like securitizing a text, thinking about it as a new asset class. There's all these investment opportunities. There's lots of data visualizations in the book, like charting alcohol or automobiles in hip hop lyrics, or it's charting different references to movies and TV shows in 30 Rock. We're looking at these kind of brand skate blockbusters like The Matrix, Ready Player One, the Chippendales movie had a preposterous amount of references in it. And these are all kind of, you know, financial opportunities.
46:12Yeah, which which brings us to, you know, the second half of the book, which is so fascinating. That's where you have all of these case studies looking at like how culture itself, the cultural texts have like just internalized these qualities of the financialization, like often to the point of self-awareness. You know, one of the overall things you posit is how qualities like speculation are actually now cultural qualities unto themselves. They're not just like aspects of financialization that are like absorbed by culture or like attached to it. So the case studies that you examine, which you divide broadly into chapters on hip hop, sitcoms and branded blockbusters, they're especially interesting because the examples that you chose do have that kind of explicit self-awareness of their economic context.
46:57Or as you put it, you wrote that they have a conflicted sense of opposition to yet exploitation of their corporate conditions, a sort of calculating complicity. So why did you choose to focus on these? And as you mentioned, like some of those examples include Jay-Z, The Matrix, The Lego Movie, 30 Rock, maybe rather than some more obvious examples of demonstrating derivative media, things that could be like, you know, reality or talk shows. Yes. And as you may have gathered, this is largely a depressing book about how Wall Street devours culture. And I think I make a persuasive argument of how destructive this has been.
47:34However, I am also a huge proponent of the fact that film and television and popular music are beautiful things that can be not just enjoyable and pleasurable, but educational and radical and can help us learn about the world and can help us think differently about the world. And it was important to me that I choose case studies that were on that line, that tricky gray area of, in some ways, innovating new financial mechanisms. But on the other hand, commenting on it and helping us learn about it. And, you know, 30 Rock is, yeah, funny and smart and complicit and did a lot of great advertising.
48:12It was actually like really sought after by advertisers because it had this, its demographic was pretty high income. Emmys. It's winning. It has so much acclaim. I use it in my television class all the time. It's really sharp, right? Those are the things that are really interesting to me about popular culture. So yeah, I could have chosen reality shows or talk shows. I talk a little bit about like The Biggest Loser, this like awful reality show. It's full of all these brand integrations and is, you know, has this awful ideology about beauty standards and gender and whatnot. Yeah, I could have dumped on all these awful parts of popular culture, but I don't want to be that.
48:51I don't want to suggest that this is all for naught, that this is like ruined. We still get lots of really interesting things. And I think Jay-Z is a really interesting figure, good and bad. There is so much interesting going on in his career. You know, as he says, he's not a businessman. He's a businessman. There's so much about his like empire of culture that is provocative. And in fact, we can learn about the system through things like JC and 30 Rock and the Matrix and the Lego movie. The flip side is kind of did 30 Rock actually create new forms of derivative media? Did it create new pricing mechanisms?
49:26Yeah. And the Matrix. Yeah. One of my favorite sort of properties feels awkward to call it that really interesting philosophically as a metaphor for capitalism or an allegory, I should say. And also was this new type of cross-platform, you know, transmedia, as they call it, told a story across all these different things in different ways. And then the latest version is kind of, it's a really sad story about how it became the thing that they were rebelling against, right? But that's still really valuable to have this like sad reflection on what became of the Matrix as a brand, as a franchise. Right.
50:04Because then, well, here we are like conversing about it, thinking about it now, the whole you know parable within the matrix of like i forget is it the second one where it's like you find out like neo is just like the pressure release valve like created by the robot because they're always going to need that outlet and then that's like actually what ends up happening with the matrix film franchise you know but here we are aware of that and engaging with that can we escape it we'll find out in another question we're going to ask you a few minutes but yeah so i was really, really fascinated and appreciated like your use of data in this, because I think so much like just throughout the book and helping really give some heft and sort of concrete outlines to, you know, these kind of topics that we otherwise really talk about in qualitative rather than quantitative ways.
50:49So I'd love to hear more about sort of your choice to mine these databases, if you don't mind me using the word mine, to use databases like Genius and IMDB in combination with the cataloging software to identify these various patterns in artistic production, like everything like you were saying, from the brand names that get name check and rap lyrics to all of the references in 30 Rock. What were some of the patterns that you identified more specifically? And what were some of the qualities of derivative media that they revealed to you? Yeah, you know, so part of this project is kind of like thinking like a financier.
51:25If I were a hedge fund manager, how would I approach media, right? Getting in that mindset, I did interview lots of venture capitalists as well. And how do they think about culture, right? And part of my effort to use databases and data mining, thinking about culture from the point of view of the marketplace, the point of view of investment banker. And I wanted to get away from the subjective or qualitative understanding of texts and actually get a little more material about like, well, how do they work as pricing mechanisms? How do they work as these sort of synergized franchises across different platforms?
52:02And so, yeah, the database allowed me to get at really granular aspects of how media texts work today without being that sort of evaluative mode of interpreting the meaning of text. That's still important, but this is a different mode, right? So I started looking at case studies that lent themselves to that. The Bransky blockbuster that is making dozens or hundreds of references. 30 Rock, like you say, I obsessively cataloged all of the references being made, partly being assisted by Genius or IMDb. There's some Reddit thread out there that loves you forever for doing that. The opportunities it gave was looking at the text a little differently, right?
52:42I mean, lots of people have written about how sharp and smart 30 Rock is, for instance. But when we look at it from this sort of it's both distant and really close, right? It's every single reference categorized in a particular way. But it's also like looking at it from a bird's eye view, like, well, what is happening here? So it's, yeah, some things that were surprising. I did not expect there to be such a clear degree that that referential quality, that intertextual quality, like slowly gets higher and higher every season. Didn't think it would be such a clear trend line. And then over the course of a single season, it also gets more variable, like the huge swings in a lot of references or none.
53:20And it's like as if in the back half of a season, things get a little wilder with reliance on references, let's say. Academic scholarship, this sometimes called distance reading or cultural analytics and like approaching cultural texts from this sort of database model. And it is part of like a larger field called digital humanities. But in the digital humanities, we're like, we're not trying to prove something. We're not looking for the answers. We're not using data to prove something like you might on the scientific side of campus. Instead, we're trying to like ask new questions using that. And that was what I was doing.
53:53A big one I joked about Outback Steakhouse earlier that it was happy to be joked about. In fact, something I wouldn't have noticed unless it was having done this obsessive database was that they, 30 Rock, just made jokes about them in a couple seasons. only later did Outback Steakhouse approach them and say like, can we pay for another one? Can we have an actual brand integration situation here? And then looking through the database, found a bunch of examples of that, like Bed Bath & Beyond. At first they make jokes about it unpaid, and then later they will get paid for it. And that's sort of the really nefarious part of this is like, well, that kind of turns every joke into a possible contract, right?
54:30A possible product placement in the future, a possible paid relationship. And so, yeah, it becomes kind of fungible, becomes kind of like securitized, like there's all these new aspects there. So that was, you know, surprising to me. And one of those things are, you know, you follow a hunch and then you dig and dig and you find more evidence for what you were looking at. It's so fascinating. And this is where I wonder if things become even more magnified in the era of social media, where, I don't know, you think about a show like White Lotus, I don't know if you watched it, and how you could almost like break it down into all of these different potentially memeable moments or memeable characters or like getting the pop star Lisa involved and how every moment in a show and every joke has the potential to explode in the attention market and then from there lead to something like that potentially.
55:27Like a number of White Lotus related viral moments at Coachella this weekend because she played Coachella. Oh, yeah. And was she referencing White Lotus at all? Yes. Like, there was a big moment. Like, the actress's, or the artist's name who played Mook is Lisa from Blackpink. And yeah, she's already, like, a giant solo artist in her own rate. But, like, I know I was interested to go see her because she's Mook. And there was a moment during the set where she was just like, I bet a lot of you are surprised to see Mook on stage. This is what she does when she's not working. And, like, everyone was screaming.
55:59and then the next day there were all these photos of like patrick schwartzenegger going nuts in the crowd and then like the actor who played guy talk showed up in photos later and i was even joking to my friend when i was there i was like if they were smart they would have gotten the actor who played guy talk to be like a security guard by the stage like with her during her set i was like that would have been like a million dollar marketing idea i don't think that's quite what happened i think he was just there as like a guest like for another black pink set but yeah you know right but that's That's a great example because you don't know whether it is a great marketing example or if it happens to be just fun.
56:35Right. And that is another gray area and something I'm really exploring with the 30 Rock example is like we never know if it is fun, if it is like a sharp critique or whether it is a paid placement or some combination of those many characteristics. And we are left to sort of be skeptical and be like, is this something that, you know, occurred, you know, quote unquote organically or not? I'm skeptical of that situation and what it means for art and culture to be constantly in this mindset of like, oh, that's really good marketing or not. But yeah, it's the White Lotus is a good example. That is a show that was certainly the first season pretty sharp in its critique of class struggle, let's say.
57:21and willing to kind of bite the hand that feeds or willing to comment on extreme wealth and privilege. And has that commentary sort of been watered down over the seasons? I think that it's worth considering as it became more of a phenomenon. And yeah, that would be another example of this way in which, yeah, in the attention economy or whether our, you know, just engagement with popular culture. Is this constant references, constant fragmentation of different texts? How much of our experience on social media is like seeing a clip from a reality show or seeing a reference to White Lotus or, you know, the way that Succession, as another example, just like diffused into so many different pathways and had so many different experiences with it.
58:08How many of those are opportunities for profit from a big company? And how can only big companies really do that. I'm thinking about how an important thing now in like Hollywood entertainment and music was thinking about like fandoms, the importance of tapping into pre-existing fandoms and how White Lotus tapped into like the Duke-UNC basketball rivalry, right? And I saw people like circulating the images of the father of the Durham family wearing a Duke shirt during March Madness and how that could become an opportunity both for the creators of the show and also maybe for, you know, some advertiser who wants to like latch on to that meme in some way.
58:54It's just kind of fascinating. Yeah, you know, it recalls two, you know, important things that we discussed already, but the importance of free labor, right? And so, yeah, you're right to say it's about engaging with fandom. Increasingly, that engagement with fandom is exploitation of free labor, getting people to do the work for them. That again, only the biggest companies can do. Yeah. I think it's also worth noting that Lisa hadn't acted before the White Lotus, which is, I think, an important detail. It's not like she was already established as an actress. This was probably just like much like the whole Duke thing, like just to get that whole brand of the whole giant like Blackpink fandom or her fandom.
59:33Yeah. And it's like not just not just getting me to go watch her at Coachella, but the opposite, you know. And I think she was terrific in the role. Like, don't not not knocking her at all. Like I said, I'm totally a fan now, but, you know, that that role didn't go to like a, you know, up and coming like Thai actress who's like been working on building her acting career. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's similar to the prevalence of hit songs that are always featuring someone from a slightly different genre or demographic. Right. Bring them together. Same with content creators doing these collaborations with others.
1:00:04Right. Big companies working with other big companies, these like joint ventures. They look like some sort of artistic or cultural mechanism, but in fact, has a pretty obvious corporate and financial connection behind the scenes. And then that also recalls another aspect of the sort of different predators, let's say, in this big ocean. I've mentioned asset management, private equity, venture capital. But derivatives traders are also an aspect of media companies now. And so, yeah, we think, oh, I'm a writer or director or I'm starting a small media company. And like, how am I going to compete with Disney?
1:00:38Disney has you know a century-long relationship with people in this country it has all this tremendous intellectual property that people love it has a streaming service it has its huge marketing arm it has its theme parks yeah it has all that but what you really can't compete with is Disney's derivatives traders it has investment bankers who are hedging Chinese currency because of when they release their movies in China like what happens if the you know we need to hedge our bets there? What if, you know, things don't go well in China? Well, the currency shifted, right? They're making investment trades like that, that obviously no independent creator can compete with.
1:01:14Again, it's about scale. It's about market power. So we've allowed these companies to achieve just enormous size that the idea of competition is just like no longer even available within the cultural industries. And what does that mean? It means this kind of cheapened approach to art and culture, this franchise model that is, you know, going to be more and more devastating when we are dealing with bigger and bigger issues. You know, I'm constantly connecting this to our ability to fight climate collapse, for instance, or the increasing authoritarian regimes around the world. We need stories, we need songs, we need journalism, we need a healthy public sphere to be able to fight back against these things or to change our social order and that it is not so needlessly wasteful of energy, contributing constant greenhouse gases, etc.
1:02:09We need the ability to exchange information in a different way. In fact, the way that our cultural industries are incentivized and financialized, we're getting further and further away from that possibility, you know, let alone actually dealing with class struggle, dealing with the perverse wealth inequalities within our world. So in the second half of the book, you talk about some of the texts you examines as sort of examples of autumnal culture. Could you talk about what that means, autumnal culture? I know it's like based on a quote by Fernand Brodel and kind of just how this moment in the culture industry that you're capturing is maybe a mirror of larger developments in sort of the history of capitalism over time.
1:02:59Yeah, so we've been talking, you know, mostly about the last 10, 20 years, maybe 30, and that is the time period of which I'm mostly interested in for derivative media, for cultural industries in the U.S. But an important prehistory to that that I outline as well is we really need to think of capitalism as a system and how it operates. And so I am subscribed to the idea by Robert Brenner called The Long Downturn. And so Brenner very meticulously documents how since the early 1970s, there's just been a long decline in growth and profitability within American capitalism specifically or America's hegemonic role within capitalism, I should say, and just an overall deteriorating political economy.
1:03:46There's just less growth, less profit, less investment, more debt, and that this continues to happen. And as Brenner says, we're just papering over the problem, continually adding more liquidity into the system, but not ever actually growing. And this is the immediate context for what I'm looking at, like, well, finance happens more within that kind of increased liquidity, increased incentivizing for finance to do those sort of tactics. But then even that the long downturn, why is American growth, you know, stumbling, global growth, even stumbling since the 70s. Then for that answer, we turn to Arigi, an author who looks at the larger structure of capitalism that it has grown from.
1:04:31It starts in Genoa, Italy, moves to Amsterdam and the Dutch Empire, moves to London and the British Empire, moves to New York City, Wall Street, the United States. There's this continual growth. There's always a hegemonic center to capitalism, But as it grows, it eventually finds a sort of new center. As it's finding that new center, the previous one is financializing. There's less growth. And so instead of manufacturing, it turns to finance in this transitional moment. And so Origi, you know, really documents this, not quite the click call, but this because it's kind of it's continually growing, right?
1:05:08From a small city state in Italy to a bigger empire, bigger empire, bigger empire gets to the US. But noticing and sort of documenting that cycle at this point with the U.S. empire, with its stage in capitalism, it's now on the decline. It is now not growing. It is financializing. And so that is the context for what I'm looking at. It's not as if we made some bad decisions. This, unfortunately, is a common recurrent that we will, you know, blame Ronald Reagan, you know, for cursing us with neoliberalism, right? That's cheaply characterizing people's argument about neoliberalism. But the idea that it was just bad policy choices, that, oh, we just shouldn't have privatized.
1:05:52We shouldn't have gotten rid of the unions. We shouldn't have lowered tax rates for the wealthy. If we'd have just made better decisions, if we get the public will on side for beefing up unions again with increasing tax rates. I mean, yes, do all those things. But these are all symptoms, right? Neoliberalism, privatization. These are all symptoms of declining profit rates, declining growth rates. It wasn't in and of itself a policy choice in the 80s. It was a long-term cyclical aspect of capitalism that it cannot continually grow. And now it seems to have hit its planetary limit. Maybe there will be a shift to a new Chinese hegemon.
1:06:33It certainly is a new center of growth in particular ways, but it's also really limited in other ways. we've done the low-hanging fruit of fossil fuels. We built all the cities. There's not this opportunity for growth as there once was. And so maybe capitalism as a system that continually needs growth, that continually is accumulating profit and consolidating it into just a few hands, that that doesn't work anymore. And so this idea of thinking about the long durée of capitalism and that we are now in a autumnal culture, we're on the decline, on the downswing, is how I contextualize what we're looking at and why we should expect this.
1:07:13These are all symptoms of the rot within the capitalist system. And that's partly what informs my looking for this financialized culture is like, well, finance is the growing dominant form within capitalism in the U.S. right now. So, of course, the cultural industries are going to sort of echo that. It's all downstream from the deteriorating economic conditions within capitalism itself. So where do we go from here? Right. We can definitely individually impact the outcome, can't we? Yeah. Right. And so this is tricky, right? I start with this long prehistory of capitalism and then get into more of the aspects of pop culture itself and the companies and effect on labor.
1:08:01And of course, you can do things at the level of a union, at the level of labor. You can even do things at the level of you as a person. You can engage with popular culture differently. You can be your own algorithm. Don't let companies decide for you what you spend your time with, how that attention is used. You can join organizations that are fighting back against these particular things. We can go up the layers towards political effects, policy changes that could be made in terms of like antitrust, preventing that kind of market consolidation. There are things that can be done and there are, you know, influential figures or inspiring figures even like Lena Khan, who has did a lot for competition and pumping the brakes on constant mergers and further monopoly in market power.
1:08:54But we are also maybe constrained in our ability to operate through simple reforms, and that the system is far larger and the lina cons of the world seem very rare. That is not an accident, right? We are in this country ruled by two parties that are, you know, very friendly to capitalist interests. For the most part, there's a lot of shared ideology and incentives. And thus, you know, maybe democracy is more like the managerial style of capitalism, keeps the accumulation going, despite the effects it's having on our planet, despite the effect it's having on our political climate, the effects it's having on justice and fairness among people.
1:09:39So maybe we think a little wider rather than just What are some policy changes we can make? Again, those are worth fighting for. And like, I think we should absolutely fight for antitrust. We should fight for changing the tax code for sure. It's worth fighting for those things. But it's also worth considering that you're not necessarily changing the system. You are like getting rid of its worst aspects that might perpetuate it. So yeah, thinking wider than that, thinking what a social order that's not based on accumulation looks like that's not based on the labor wage system. I'm thinking wider, and I think actually culture can be the place where that happens.
1:10:21Lots of really great science fiction stories that help us imagine new worlds, right? In the same way that I talked about that myth that the cultural industries operate according to some sort of natural rules about people choose what is most popular, the social order itself is decisions we've made and could easily make in a different way. So there's no natural occurring economy. There's no natural occurring political economy. We can make different decisions. Popular culture can help us think differently. And I talk in the book a lot about critical financial literacy. Like we need to learn how hedge funds and asset managers and private equity firms work so that we can kind of dismantle the destructive power they have, but also means that we can use popular culture to explain those opaque processes.
1:11:13And we can learn more about what comes after. We can have new imaginaries. We can have new utopian visions. Popular culture could be doing so much more than constantly rehashing the same old characters. It could be a place for how we imagine that new social order. Well, Andrew, thank you so much. Fascinating book. which people can, I believe, get for free as a free download as an e-book or they can buy it. Yeah, it's on University of California Press. So you can find it there both as an e-book, as a PDF or an e-pub. So feel free to download it for free. If you want to purchase a physical copy, you can as well.
1:11:55Available at all your favorite retailers. I would encourage you to, you know, not use Amazon, but whatever you need to get it. and you can also go to my website injuredaward.com I've made all the data and visualizations available for teaching purposes or you can get a quick overview of some of the things we've talked about today and then yeah, reach out if you want to chat Thanks so much Thank you, pleasure to be here
1:12:30This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.
1:13:03Thank you.
From the publisher
Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop?
According to Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included.
That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text.”
Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to The White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA.
Order a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free.
Read more by Andrew:
The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press)
“Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe
