Chris Martin
@chrismeetworld
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Just starting this book called Derivative Media. A tldr from it's intro:
"In short, financialization is transforming culture in many negative ways: through its material extraction of capital, reducing our cultural capacity; its legal machinations, contractually binding media companies into licensing agreements and further exploitation of IP; its textual ramifications, transforming our songs and stories into financial instruments; its historical rupture, reorganizing the structure of creative work into tradable assets; and its subjective effect, as popular culture is seen as less capable of complex art, in favor of cheap copies predicated on brand recognition and nostalgia. This book argues that financialization is a key structural
force—perhaps the key structural force—shaping cultural production and circula-
tion today. Contrary to the myth that finance capital merely allocates resources
according to neutral market forces, this book demonstrates that finance is not effi-
ciently allocating our cultural resources; rather, it plunders our stories, songs, and
creative labor through financial engineering. Contemporary popular media texts now function as risk-hedging derivatives through which capital accumulates in diversified cultural hedge funds operated by a handful of transnational media corporations, disciplined by even bigger financial firms. The result is wider resources and thus audiences for formulaic film, television, and popular music, while more diverse and radical productions are fed through the algorithm to be financialized.
Culture has a subservient role in the financial system, which sees it as merely
another numerical value to trade. The stock exchange has been embedded within
the media text. This financialized media system generates inequality, both mate-
rial and cultural, through labor suppression and upward redistribution of wealth.
We need critical financial literacy to understand this shift in the organization of
culture if there is to be any chance of reversing its decline. The old models of ownership and management are outdated; the flows of finance are now dominant, but
remain in the shadows. Financialization is a little-understood, profoundly transformative, and fundamentally destructive force within the cultural industries." 0 reply
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