Who Is John Galt? Writers Strike The Nerve That Counts: Public Opinion

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Who Is John Galt? Writers Strike The Nerve That Counts: Public Opinion

by Rachel Sklar

Huffington Post

November 26, 2007

From the article:

Here, Alan Greenspan, help us out here: In Ayn Rand's defining work, Atlas Shrugged, the world's defining original thinkers and innovators band together and go on strike, preferring to remove their gifts from the world rather than have them exploited and abused by the cheap, venal, mercenary second-handers and followers who failed to appreciate their brilliance. The strikers all retreated, leaving a crumbling infrastructure behind them, to follow their leader, the mysterious John Galt, into his unfortunately-named lair (I'm sorry, but could "Galt's Gulch" sound any less lofty and inspiring?).

. . .

My point — and I do have one, other than invoking images of Howard Roark naked on a cliff — is that I have kept coming back to that analogy during the course of this writers' strike. Somehow, the writers have managed to cast themselves as the ultimate John Galts — the mysterious, shadowy figures behind the shows that are our TV lifeblood, the people who make Jim love Pam and keep Carlos and Gabby running around Wisteria Lane half-naked and alone know the full reach of power concentrated in one single blonde auto-regenerating teenager — never mind keeping Ellen funny.

Hat tip to Dennis Hardin: ATLAS SHRUGGED: Socialist Manifesto.

This whole business does bring up several interesting aspects. I have been particularly interested in what the alternative Web 2.0 culture is offering writers in terms of income. For those who do not know, Web 2.0 is a way of using the Internet in a social manner, sort of like a forum, but with many more bells and whistles.

The best explanation I have heard of this so far is by the guy who started the Creative Commons licenses, Lawrence Lessig. He said that the Internet is divided into two cultures in terms of content: the read only culture and the read-write culture. In the read only culture, you have products that are generally made outside the Internet and then offered to customers over the Internet (like movies, songs, books, etc.). The customer can take a product or leave it, but he can only consume it. With the explosion of sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo, blogging (and I could go on and on), users are turning into producers and providing their own content for their own amusement.

This is complicated by the fact that the very act of using a product on the Internet implies making a copy of it. Copying is all the Internet can do to deliver information to a browser. It copies works into bits and bytes and sends these copies over connections (cable or wireless). This makes hash out of the very root of copyright laws, which were developed to protect the right to copy a work. There has been a lot of controversy over trying to set which copies are protected and which are not.

In the meantime, the Web 2.0 culture is going on its merry way with many people grabbing a piece of this and a piece of that, sticking them together and making new products in order to show them off to their friends. They also produce their own content. Here is a good example of mashing together content of others:

, and almost any of the popular blogs where comments are allowed will do for original content.

This is no longer a practice that can be stopped by law. Too many people are doing it and it apparently satisfies a deep human need. It is a new reality and many intelligent people are involved in trying to set the new rules for turning all this into wealth while still reserving room for principal creators (and making them even more wealthy). And believe me, from what I have been studying, the money is flowing in floods to those who are open to learning the new rules. (Just look at the millions and billions of dollars being reported on web company deals.)

I will have much more to say about Web 2.0 over time, but for now, I want to highlight the fact that the writer's strike is centered on the read-only culture. BIG studioos. BIG power. BIG control of product and distribution. This is a structure that I believe will never go away entirely, and BIG money will stay a part of it, but it will never again dominate the realm of possibilities open to writers like it once did. BIG power and BIG control are on the out.

Thus, I think Sklar's comparison to Galt's Gultch is really a stretch. The very existence of Web 2.0 makes hash of it. The creators are not leaving society or the world of entertainment—they are only leaving one type of entertainment structure.

As to the writers, they are scrambling for a bigger piece of a pie where cut-throat nastiness is part of the culture. They would gain much more (including much more money and artistic satisfaction) if they opened up new avenues using this new technology. As reported in the article, the writers certainly have made good use of Web 2.0 during this strike time to spread their message. I wonder when some of them are going to wake up and start thinking in terms of new products using Web 2.0.

However, that would be a medium term project for most of them and I don't think medium term is popular among Hollywood's working class. So I guess we are stuck for now with watching a power struggle and seeing weird MSM comparisons to Rand.

Michael