Is this the end?
What do people write about for their last column? I could shout out my Daily Trojan boss. We could talk about hopes for the future, those little “what ifs” that we dream will bring us closer to media than ever before, even though I don’t believe that. So we’re going to talk about choices. And capitalism.
Appearing in the 1970s and snowballing in the years since is what Andrew deWaard, assistant professor of media and popular culture at University of California, San Diego, calls ‘financialization’ — “the accelerated growth of the financial sector and its extractive logic, which relies on financial engineering rather than commodity production.”
DeWaard’s argument in “Financialized Hollywood: Institutional Investment, Venture Capital, and Private Equity in the Film and Television Industry” builds on those of film and media historians Janet Wasko, Thomas Schatz and Jennifer Holt in that conglomerates still control the filmmaking process in a devastating way, only now they are “mere investment and profit-extraction opportunities for truly powerful firms such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Bain Capital, TPG, and Silver Lake…”
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are investment firms, owning about 88% of the companies on the United States S&P 500, a stock market performance index that looks at the top 500 performing companies. Combined with minimal financial regulation, these firms took ownership of competing interests in the same industries (such as Apple and Microsoft being owned by Vanguard and Blackrock, respectively) and, in turn, jacked up prices and kept worker wages low as ever.
Media companies are already under threat, with the investment firm Vanguard owning the largest stakes in Disney, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and AT&T, and mere second largest stakes in CBS and Netflix. Private equity firms leverage debt against a company, buy it, achieve “maximum efficiency” by cutting out labor that digs into profits and then sell that new skeleton of a company to someone else at a much higher price.
Left behind in these acquisitions and eviscerations are product-forward initiatives, diverse and burgeoning talent and the capacity for these media companies to work toward their best in terms of the media they create. More and more people are losing their jobs, prices continue to soar and those who act as the eviscerators are earning more than ever before. These financial tactics are basically unregulated and are sure to worsen.
Any introspection that focuses on the state of our economic system and capitalism as a gutting force also requires some personal consideration.
One of the things that USC has boasted about our educational experience is the real-world opportunities and connections. If you are looking at a post-graduate position or a summer internship, it is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile your position with the greater scheme of these corporations.
That being said, it is also extraordinarily difficult to find a position that’ll offer resources for even the minimum in terms of cost of living. We’re being thrust into a world that, for some, forces a confrontation between moral values and quality of life. I don’t have an answer for you or for anyone else’s particular situation — like I said, these are choices.
What we get out of life often is explained in trades or exchanges, something that I’ve hopefully come in contact with in this column. Attending film school is one of these exchanges, putting you in a position that is often overwhelmingly aware of the deterioration of media as we know and love it, all in order to bring the studies of film and TV closer to our hearts.
Whatever you end up doing, be conscious of your passions, however fleeting or changing, and prioritize them. There are too many forces willing and ready to take advantage of them. And, of course, thank you for reading.
Lauren Mattice is a senior writing about film culture. She is also the digital managing editor at the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Film Schooled,” ran every other Wednesday.