Loading ...
Funny word in an industry sense, isn’t it? “Independence.” In the geekosphere of pop culture creation, it’s usually taken to mean that you are beholden to no overlords, no company or collective, that has a say over what you produce and how you produce it. I suppose it gets more complicated when you consider that there are definitely companies or collectives who you can technically surrender some or all of your independence to but those companies or collectives themselves are considered “independent.” Perhaps it just comes down to a matter of scale?
I think more important than scale is the mindset, though. Critical Role Productions, LLC makes millions of dollars every year for its founders, who are the cast members of Critical Role. But although they do run some aspects of their business carefully (as you’ll see when Matt Mercer cuts off any non-public domain song asides from the group before they reach the threshold of copyright lawsuit) they still feel in touch with their audience. The audience are still their customers. If they took any other ventures under their wing, it wouldn’t feel like a hostile takeover. They don’t see similar enterprises like Dimension 20 as competitors to be dominated but as fellow travelers to talk shop with and even cross-pollinate for promotion and fun.
There’s a point where that stops, and I’m not going to say it’s entirely a matter of independence because there are definitely some assholes out there in indie-land and not all of them fail. But I do believe that there’s a sharp divide that businesses hit where you can see a before and after, and that’s the public offering. The company is now on a stock exchange, or indirectly so because they were bought by a bigger fish that is. The shift is fundamentally the same, though… the consumer is no longer the customer. The consumer becomes a resource to be… let’s say “leveraged”… in the service of your new actual customers, the stockholders.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the teardown of capitalism here, but it just feels like a built-in problem to me when full incorporation by design detaches a company from the end users. Now it’s all about the stock price and being able to show a constantly rising chart and it feels like no one really cares about the means of how you achieve that, just make it happen. That detachment, that ends-justifying-the-means mentality that turns people into statistics… it’s baked in, especially nowadays where people don’t seem to want to invest in companies and earn steady dividends so much as ride the waves of buying low and selling high to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, then get out. What’s the company? What’s it creating? Who cares?
Well, there’s still wriggle room for creativity under these circumstances–I sure liked Andor and Disney is about as big a corporate overlord as it gets–but it feels like it’s in spite of the system rather than enabled by it, like the Eye of Sauron was looking elsewhere but once something like Frozen is a runaway hit you can bet Frozen 2 is going to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb by execs attempting to put quantifiable numbers on every aspect of human connection.
The detachment of incorporation affects everything, but in particular I feel it clashes with the creative arts where the human connection is everything. You can go by the numbers and there are certainly tried-and-true ways to manipulate the sort of emotional responses desired from a crowd, but in the end there’s still that nagging feeling because the ones at the top of the chain are very definitely not interested in telling a good story except as a by-product of getting them rich.
I mean at least it’s not a cigarette conglomerate, but ClearStream is undeniably my commentary on this situation and how that detachment can make even human life nothing more than numbers on a balance sheet. And although aspects of it are exaggerated–I doubt even a piece of work like Bobby Kotick sits in a dark room dramatically steepling his fingers–I’m glad that for all our faults, the only margins Dawn and I are truly concerned with have to do with page layouts.