Capitalism Is Draining the Life From Our Culture Industries
Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe.
Disney has picked off Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel since 2006 — not exactly mom-and-pop entities at the time of their purchase. (Jaque Silva / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The central notion of Andrew deWaard’s enlightening book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, is this: there are a small number of mammoth companies hegemonizing the entertainment industry. They are akin to the cluster of firms that dominate tech, and as with the tech giants, most of their offices are bunched together, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s a Billionaires’ Row populated not by artists or creatives but by hedge fund analysts, asset managers, and various other suits of all sizes.
Presaged by Marxist critiques of political economy, the book tells the story, as deWaard puts it, of how “the cultural lifeblood of a country has been spilled on these streets by a rogues’ gallery of financial villainy,” acting with the help of various weapons: “financial instruments and strategies such as dividends, stock buybacks, diversified portfolios, management fees, index funds, tax loopholes, and futures contracts.”
Culture Vultures
DeWaard paints a bleak picture of the predatory capitalist behavior underpinning — some might say driving — the popular arts today. He primarily focuses on music, movies, and television, eschewing news media, video games, or more high-end cultural pursuits such as dance, theater, and opera. Paragraphs heave with figures and percentages, many of which are backed up by charts and graphs — this is primarily an academic work. But the author does make an effort to keep things light and accessible, comparing media barons to Charles Foster Kane and quoting Succession’s failson in chief Kendall Roy to explain private equity.
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