The Hollywood writers’ strike, like most strikes, is about money. It is also, fundamentally, about technology. The rise of streaming platforms has not had happy consequences for the writers who satisfy the ever-growing demand for scripted content. According to the Writers Guild of America, the studios have transformed an industry that once supported stable writing careers into a gig economy of precarious, low-paying freelance work. And a new technological threat looms: AI-powered writing tools. The strikers are demanding a guarantee that the studios won’t cut them out of royalty payments by crediting AI tools like ChatGPT as authors of scripts or as source material. In their opposition to a technological shift widely deemed unstoppable, the writers inevitably invite comparisons to history’s most famous technophobes: the Luddites.

The Luddites’ infamous attacks on machinery were the culmination of their activities, not the beginning. The weavers had a legal right to control the textile trade, including setting prices and production standards. They considered factory owners to be operating outside the law. The weavers appealed to the British Crown to enforce the terms of the royal charter, but were ignored. With no other recourse, they took matters into their own hands.

Those 19th-century textile mills have more in common with contemporary “disruptors” than you might think. The likes of Uber and Spotify have also been accused of evading existing legal structures. Call it “platform exceptionalism”: the notion that, because an existing service now comes to us via an app, the old rules don’t apply. So Uber, a taxi service, doesn’t have to follow taxi laws, and Airbnb, an accommodation provider, can avoid hotel or zoning regulations. Since 1960, paying radio operators to play certain songs has been illegal “payola,” but Spotify is allowed to give artists a boost in visibility if they agree to forfeit royalties. In each case, workers bear the cost of the change: Gig workers and musicians both struggle to live off the crumbs they receive from the platforms.

Platform exceptionalism goes to the heart of the WGA’s wage demands. Studios treat streaming content as distinct from cable and broadcast, and claim they can pay writers much less for it. But streaming shows and movies are produced in the same way as everything else. The studios’ position is rooted in nothing but confidence that they’re powerful enough to get away with it.

In this way, platform exceptionalism works like outsourcing, whereby companies relocate their operations to jurisdictions where rules on pay and working conditions don’t apply. Outsourcing turns out to be part of the troubled story of labor in the 21st-century entertainment industry.

Today’s workers have more options. Italy has banned ChatGPT, arguing that it violates European data-protection laws. Artists are testing the legal waters by suing AI companies for copyright infringement based on the unauthorized incorporation of their work into training-data sets. The NBA players’ union prevented owners from using fitness-tracking data in contract negotiations. Unionized casino workers in Las Vegas have kept robots at bay, and in 2018, Marriott housekeepers went on strike in part to oppose new scheduling software.

One of Milwaukee’s best music venues, Cactus Club, was contacted by Live Nation, and as club owner Kelsey Kaufmann explains in this tiktok- harassed her about Milwaukee’s Deer District double venue complex planned to begin building in 2023, a project that she vocally does not support.

A rep from Live Nation, the $18+BIL company who also bought up a large portion of Madison’s music venues in 2018, and is, as you should remember, also the same company at the center of the Astroworld tragedy that killed 10- called Kelsey and became antagonistic when she was critical of the proposed double venue project across from one of Milwaukee’s other historic venues, Turner Hall.

Despite a growing movement against the project other venues formed a group called Save MKE’s Music Scene, which made a petition from Concerned Downtown Neighbors, and has nearly 10k signatures, the Milwaukee Common Council last week on October 25 voted to recommend zoning, so this project is all but inevitable- and is slated to open in early 2024. The Council will likely go forward with full approval tomorrow, November 1.