{"id":1861,"date":"2017-02-23T19:59:01","date_gmt":"2017-02-23T19:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=1861"},"modified":"2017-02-23T20:10:42","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T20:10:42","slug":"want-better-movies-want-keep-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/want-better-movies-want-keep-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Do we want better movies, or do we want to keep our jobs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gut check: does the film industry exist to tell great stories, or does it exist it employ a large number of artisans?<\/p>\n<p>A little background. I&#8217;ve heard this question, or some version of\u00a0it,\u00a0many times:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/iampliny\">@iampliny<\/a> That&#39;s all well and good, but how can we expand the field of players while preserving the &quot;paid&quot; part of the professions needed.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Alexis Van Hurkman (@hurkman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hurkman\/status\/834837282192445440\">February 23, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>What Alexis is asking\u2014I think\u2014is this: &#8220;how can we disrupt stuff but in a way that no one loses their job?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>(My apologies to Mr. Van Hurkman if I&#8217;ve mischaracterized his tweet. If so, let this stand in as a proxy for a commonly-raised objection.)<\/p>\n<p>Not only am I sure that this goal impossible, I&#8217;m not so sure that it&#8217;s <em>desirable<\/em>. A vote to maintain the status quo below-the-line is an implicit vote to maintain the status quo above-the-line.<\/p>\n<p>Any meaningful change will necessarily destroy <em>some<\/em> jobs. It\u00a0also creates new ones. But more importantly, change creates new <em>opportunities<\/em>. It uncovers opportunity costs that we never realized we were paying. True disruption\u00a0unleashes bottled-up creativity.<\/p>\n<p>For example, we can probably agree that a wave of digital cameras\u2014from the RED One to the GoPro\u2014destroyed a lot of jobs at Kodak. But it\u00a0also empowered hundreds of thousands\u00a0of new\u00a0filmmakers. And most\u00a0of them\u00a0would\u00a0otherwise have never gotten\u00a0started in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Was that trade-off worth it?<\/p>\n<p>Do we want better stories, or do we all want to keep our jobs?<\/p>\n<p>Not too long ago, 99% of the human race was dedicated full-time to cultivating food. <em>Little House On The Prairie<\/em> is an endless litany of churning butter, stringing onions, trapping animals, threshing wheat, and generally just trying very hard to not starve to death.\u00a0And only\u00a0200 years ago, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sleuthsayers.org\/2013\/06\/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html\" target=\"_blank\">a single shirt cost $3500<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Today, a very\u00a0small\u00a0fraction of humans are capable of feeding the other 99.999% of us. Was that trade-off worth it?<\/p>\n<p>Is it the job of the agricultural industry to employ as many farmers as possible? Or to feed humanity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is a vote for the status quo below-the-line an implicit vote for the status quo above-the-line?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1861"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1871,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861\/revisions\/1871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}