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In America, it seems like the days are long past where you could start your career with a company and then, after years of loyal service, retire from that same company decades later. Nowadays it’s all about “At Will” employment, which is usually sold as the freedom for an employee to quit and seek opportunity elsewhere at their discretion, with no notice needing to be given, but in practice tends to favor the employer who can terminate the employee at any time, for any reason. It doesn’t matter whether said employee has worked at the company for three months or thirty years–the axe hangs ever over their head, ready to fall at a moment’s notice, and today’s job market often isn’t all that great in terms of alternative opportunities.
Ideally of course, a person’s experience, job record and loyalty should all be taken into account, but the larger and more dispersed the organization, the more likely it is that such things are reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet. It used to be a given that the decision makers at a company would know that company and that company’s culture. For all his faults as a man, the auto workers employed under Henry Ford had a confidence that their boss was someone who understood and valued the cars being made. The newspapers were run by men who, as the saying goes, “had printer’s ink in their veins.” Now CEO’s take their MBA’s and flit from company to company horizontally, knowing how to make stockholders happy but potentially little else about the lives and products in their charge. Investing in people must seem like a losing proposition when you yourself don’t really care about cars or journalism at all and are already eyeing the next hop on your journey.
I don’t mean this as a political screed so much as an observation of cause and effect–that any institution growing or morphing beyond a certain point can lose that personal element where the loyalty and commitment of individuals matters.
And so it is going, I fear, with pop culture conventions. Since San Diego Comic-Con became such a big deal in the last decade or so, numerous other shows have blossomed in its wake. Now SDCC has certainly had its share of heartbreak amongst long-time fans and volunteers who felt squeezed out and forgotten, but at its heart it remains a non-profit organization, staffed by people who care about comics.
No, seriously, stop laughing! Yes, the outward trappings don’t seem to give that impression, but I believe that–perhaps ironically–it remains one of the most professional-friendly conventions out there, and actually does have a points system for its exhibitors whereby you get consideration for having been there consistently for a long time.
Does that help newcomers? Well, I suppose that’s the potential downside. But I have to compare that to the reports I’m getting about next year’s Emerald City Comicon, where people I know who depend on their livelihood for shows like this have found themselves wait-listed for the first time in years. Darker testimony has them being bumped for such thematic replacements as a local brewery. Darkest testimony of all was their conversation with the exhibits staffer where it was apparently strongly implied that if they forked over the cash for a booth upgrade, there would be no problem getting them in…
ECCC had a great reputation amongst exhibitors, which we ourselves got to experience firsthand in our two forays up to Seattle back in the day. We’d stopped going because we couldn’t quite cover our travel expenses on top of hotel, table, etc., but aside from some layout issues I had no real complaints with how it was run.
But it got too big for the small group of enthusiasts who had been putting it together, and so in January 2015 it was sold to burgeoning corporate convention giant ReedPOP. To be fair(?), word was there was trouble in paradise even before that point, and all the testimony I’d heard from my friends and peers was that ECCC 2015 went off without a hitch, so… welcome to the new corporate overlords, right?
Now, though, I have to wonder if we’re not seeing the first signs of that impersonal touch. As conventions continue to become big business, here comes big business to oversee them, with all the accompanying baggage that may entail.
Mind you I’m not arguing that comics & pop culture conventions were perfect before. In fact, perhaps it could be argued the touch was a little too personal in some cases. A business where everyone knows everyone else can be hell if you (rightly or wrongly) piss off the wrong person, the same way an indiscretion committed in a small town echoes far larger than it does in a major city. But I can’t help being a bit depressed to think we may be reaching a point that honest and loyal commitment to a convention may ultimately come to nothing because you’re no longer a face but a statistic, and even if the “boss” today has your back, the boss tomorrow may not know or care.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the thought that maybe the new people in charge won’t give a shit about “nerd stuff” and instead it’ll all be about just profiting off of it.
I suppose the tide is inevitable at this point. We’ll see what happens.