Hollywood Workers vs Tech: In Theory and In the News
Name
Cmehil-Warn-ccwar-sm-tpp-eecs-2024-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
11.88 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f11dd725e0bdb6c469733bed4c6dc7ad
Author(s)
Cmehil-Warn, Christian
Advisor(s)
Jackson, Jason
Raghavan, Manish
Date Issued
May 2024
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes on Hollywood were notable because of their explicit ties to technology and labor’s changing relationships. In particular, disputes around using generative AI in the workplace were widely reported in the news. This thesis examines the Hollywood strikes in two parts. The first part takes a political economy approach to examine the underlying causes of these changes in technology-labor relations. In particular, the thesis argues that an industry shift to distribution via streaming services alongside increased vertical integration brought about new imperatives to production and exponentially increased levels of data capture, enabling the labor conditions that led to the strike. Theories of creative labor and technology-labor relations are used to describe the tensions. The resulting SAG-AFTRA and WGA collective bargaining agreements are then examined within these framings. The second part of the thesis quantitatively explores the relationship between news media (which its own complex relationship with technology) and the Hollywood strikes using natural language processing techniques. Sentiment analysis and sentence embeddings are used to quantify and compare news articles across different characteristics. The results of the analysis are inconclusive.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Technology and Policy Program
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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