There’s a world where the idea of Taylor Swift fans forming a union is nothing more than a good joke. In that world, when Swifties were in turmoil over their idol’s dating life, it might have only been tongue-in-cheek to declare that “Fanworkers are the backbone of the music industry”—as the artist Brad Troemel did—and issue a call to arms to “recognize their labor by giving them the formal right to make musical and social decisions on behalf of the artists they created!” Performers often flatter their fans by giving them credit for the work—“It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours,” as Swift put it, announcing the release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)—and on some level, it’s true: Supply isn’t much good without demand. But more to the point, without all the free promotion and advertising on social media, without all the fan art and friendship-bracelet-trading that makes “Swiftonomics” a phrase you can print with a straight face, would her “Eras” tour be the kind of event that it is? There’s a reason she trademarked the term “Swiftie.”
A fan union only takes this conceit to its ludicrous, logical conclusion: If fans produce value, shouldn’t they have some say in their laboring conditions? And if their artist makes decisions that impact their workplace—such as dating a grimy edgelord—shouldn’t the fans organize their labor to protect their well-being?
We might not live in that world where this is only a joke. In July, not long after officially going on strike to protest working conditions under streaming services, the Screen Actors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, published among its strike rules an FAQ for influencers advising them to avoid posting on social media about struck work, even “just” as fans in an unpaid capacity. Swifties signing union cards is funny, but what of cosplayers putting down their Avengers masks until streamers pay out residuals? If “Influencers should refrain from posting on social media about any struck work regardless of whether they are posting organically or in a paid capacity” (my italics), as SAG-AFTRA suggests, does that mean that I, a regular person, also shouldn’t post organically in an unpaid capacity about whatever I happen to be watching? If so, wouldn’t I be withdrawing my labor until capital accedes to our demands?
Since one of the most visible effects of the Hollywood strike has been the complete cessation of actors and writers promoting their work—leading to the Emmys being postponed until, puzzlingly, Martin Luther King Jr. Day—a confused freakout promptly ensued across a variety of fandoms. Some presumed that fan art would count as scabbing, others insisted that it didn’t, and many were simply confused. Eventually, the guild attempted to clarify that only influencers who work—or hope to—under the SAG-AFTRA Influencer Agreement have been (officially) asked not to promote struck work. In other words, only professional fans—influencers who actually make money from their promotional work—need concern themselves; I, a regular Joe who loves to spend my weekends painting myself in Na’vi blue, can do whatever I want, in the organic capacity that I usually do.
And yet we’re in a strange place if these distinctions have to be made. When explaining the rules for cosplayers during a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con, SAG-AFTRA negotiating member Zeke Alton muddied the waters:
This whole thing is popular because you love the art that we create, so we can’t do this without you. We do this for you. And I think it’s been said here that you can do what you do and still support us. Weave it into your cosplay. We want to see the best Duncan Crabtree-Ireland [the executive director of SAG-AFTRA] that you could possibly do. You are creatives too, so use that creativity to benefit all of us.
So which is it? Are fans “creatives”? Do they contribute to the production of cultural value only by buying and talking about and being a passive recipient of a commodity that is actually produced by creative artists? Or are fans an organic and necessary part of the process by which a show, a character, or a franchise comes to be worth something? If fans produce “content” that has value—especially as studios are increasingly turning to influencers to fill the void of celebrities on red carpets—then why isn’t their creativity labor?
Perhaps something fundamental about cultural labor changed the moment we agreed to call it the production of “content.” The term doesn’t just de-professionalize the creation of art and culture by implying that it’s all just more chum to feed to customers too hungry to say no. It privileges the container over what it’s filled with, whether that is a platform we’re subscribed to, a brand we know and love, or a franchise we faithfully follow. If it’s all just content, then Disney can, for example, trim its CGI budgets and dump an absolute smorgasbord of Marvel Cinematic Universe-branded content on the market without fear of diluting the quality or losing customers (just as the streaming services steadily provide thinner and worse libraries of shows and movies to choose from). If the brand is what matters, a signal to consumers to buy like zombies, then why waste money on making that content good?
And yet, the term cuts both ways: If the quality of the supply stops mattering, then demand is the only determinant of content’s value. And what is a brand other than something its consumers have given value to by loving? What’s more, if it’s all content, doesn’t that bring fan-artists and cosplayers up to level with the stars? If they also produce content, then the only distinction is what that content is worth.
Something much stranger and more novel is happening here than the question of whether cosplaying is “scabbing,” which is actually fairly easy to dispense with: Asking fans to stop fanning is no different than asking the public not to cross a picket line. You don’t have to be doing paid work at a struck job site to respect a picket, because it’s just basic labor solidarity to always treat any picketed job site as a no-go zone. Strikes are about forcing capital to the bargaining table, and any leverage a supportive public can add is fair game. It’s true that a union can’t (officially) hold you to any agreement that you—as a non-member—haven’t signed, but putting down your custom-made Spider-Man web-shooter is no different from opting to buy your pumpkin spice lattes from a coffee chain that isn’t union-busting. There is nothing unusual, in other words, about suggesting that the public support the union in ways they can’t legally request, require, or demand (even if “cosplay as our executive director” is admittedly a bit out of the ordinary).
What is unusual is how the permeability of these categories—as regular consumers blend into professional fans and from there into laboring creatives—makes it hard to distinguish capital-W “Workers” from those who merely create value with their unpaid labor. If it’s all just content for capital, then aren’t we all just content producers together? More than that, it tells us something interesting about the cultural economy, in 2023, that so many people are doing volunteer promotional work for billion-dollar corporate properties that this even becomes a question. If the substantive difference between creatives and fans is only that the former get compensated for their valuable labor—while the latter volunteer it—then we’re just admitting that the work has economic value, but some people are doing it for free.
If so, it’s worth asking: How much do unpaid fans contribute to the market value of art? And what would it mean if that number is “a whole hell of a lot”?
On the flip side, if a whole hell of a lot of fans are unpaid creatives, it’s worth asking how many creatives are just fans who’ve gotten paid. The number might turn out to be equally startling. After all, as striking SAG-AFTRA artists have demonstrated by disclosing their residuals (or lack thereof), a rather shocking number of writers, actors, and essential cultural workers look a lot more like volunteers than many of us likely imagined. But it’s not just in Hollywood that artists are being cut out of their cut of the value they produce: Across the cultural field, artists are rarely paid comparable to their prominence and value, or even enough to live. In publishing, a notoriously low-paying industry, the actual writers of books, of all the workers involved in bringing a title to print, might be the least likely to be making an actual living from doing what they do; most novelists must teach because their novel-writing doesn’t pay the rent, even as multinational publishing conglomerates post huge profits.
But how many artists actually can support themselves by making art, rather than by family wealth or subsidizing their craft with other jobs? There may never have been a time when “artist” was a secure way to make a living; there may also have never been a time when it was worse than it is now. Of course, name an industry, and it’ll be the same cliché that making a living has never been harder. We all struggle to pay rent in the same overheated market; we’re all being squeezed by the same inflating capitalist economy. A lot of us have student loans we’ll never pay off; all of us have bodies that need for-profit health care. But if the best (or only) way to be a culture worker is to have a day job or working spouse, how distinct is what a writer or musician does, in strict economic terms, from cosplay?
After all, what makes arts and culture different from most industries—and what makes these distinctions tricky—is that its workers will and do work for free. They’ll hold down a job as a waiter or a package handler or sex worker, all the while going on auditions or working on their poems at night. They’ll struggle through open mics, work for exposure, and display their paintings gratis. They’ll do what they have to do to survive—while making pennies on their actual art—because they want the job more than the job wants them, because money makes it possible to do the job, rather than the reverse. A variety of feminized care professions get paid less than they deserve, when they care too much for their clients to leave the profession, but even an elementary school teacher who might be buying supplies for their kids out of their own pocket—allowing the district to keep property taxes splendiferously low—won’t actually hold down a classroom without pay. But making art for free is so common and normal that it’s just “paying your dues.” There might occasionally be a controversy—like the “nepo baby” chatter—when people notice that having another source of wealth to subsidize your art habit is the only way to do it, and we might all be briefly scandalized. But mostly, it’s just the way it is: To make art, to make culture, means supporting your ability to do so with another source of income.
It’s not easy to say when the frog starts to boil, when the water gets so hot that clearly something fundamental has changed. But maybe something strange has happened when even consumers have a job to do, a side hustle to keep culture afloat. And we all do, these days, don’t we? To be a fan of the arts, of culture, or of any kind of product whose value goes beyond the economic, is to be burdened with the responsibility for keeping it alive. Do you value the media? Well, I hope you get your local newspapers, and subscribe to good magazines (and I’m sure you’re a Slate Plus member). Do you read books? Don’t forget to preorder your favorite authors’ novels, and post about it on Instagram and Goodreads, and while you’re at it, support your local bookstore. Do you love cinema? You’ve obviously been patronizing your local theater, which is in danger of going under, but also remember to subscribe to Mubi; if we don’t support cinema, we’ll lose it. And, of course, I hope you’ve been going to see live music—since musicians make virtually nothing from their recordings (though be sure to subscribe to Bandcamp, not Spotify). How many Patreons do you pay for each month? How many Kickstarters have you funded? How many GoFundMes for your favorite comedian’s cancer treatments have you contributed to? Also, restaurants are dying unless YOU do your part, and museums too, and don’t forget libraries, and also every other single worthwhile thing that isn’t a startup selling an app. We live in a world where the billionaires and private equity ghouls are perfectly happy to let everything die unless we, the fans, bribe them not to, so we’d better get to it, shouldn’t we?
Some of this is due to the pandemic and its endless aftermath; some of this is just the latest turn of the economic screw, in a world choked by the ever-tightening grip of industries and capitalists determined to wring every last breath from it. But whatever it is, in 2023, to be a fan of the arts, to be a consumer of culture, means living in a hostage situation where the success or failure of the thing you love is somehow, perversely, on you.
What’s happening in Hollywood only exemplifies the gun the billionaires have to the head of all culture. Actors and writers are striking for many reasons, but at its heart is the question of whether studios can simply replace human creatives with A.I. that they’ve trained on the labor they hope to discard. It’s all just content, you see. So why pay writers if a machine can write the scripts? Why pay an actor if CGI can animate the zombie of her digital image? From the studios’ perspective, it makes a lot of sense: If you own the rights to a property—be it a toy, a comic franchise, or a character from a TV show—who needs creatives when you have technology? Why pay expensive labor to write and perform when you could, maybe, get an almost passable imitation from a computer for much less money?
On some level, I think we often expect capitalists to behave the way an economics textbook suggests they will: make a good product, sell it to a lot of people, invest the profits back in the business, rinse and repeat. But there’s no evidence that this is how the people who own the cultural industries think about anything. If you wanted to make good movies, a way to do that would be to pay good people to make them well. That’s not what they do. But why would you want to make good movies if you’re the only game in town? This may explain why it seems nearly impossible to get a movie made in Hollywood that isn’t connected to an already established brand, why we suffer through endless reboots and sequels and prequels and spinoffs and remakes rather than anybody creating anything new. You might be foolish enough to think that the value of culture is a function of the labor that goes into making it. What the billionaires know is that the value of an established brand is that fans will pay for it no matter how badly it’s made. It’s all just content! You might think Secret Invasion is one of the worst shows ever made, a startling nadir in the ongoing creative nosedive of the MCU; Disney believes that no matter how bad the product gets, the fans will still pay for it. But if the fans don’t behave like “rational consumers” and stop paying for the product when it gets really bad—and if workers are too in love with the work to stop doing it for free—why would we expect capitalists to do anything but maximize their profits by squeezing labor and screwing their customers?
And maybe they’re right. What are you going to do, cancel your subscriptions? Go on strike? Cosplay as a union negotiator?
Well, maybe! Taylor Swift may not lead us into the promised land; she was asked to postpone some of her Los Angeles concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers, though I’m not sure anyone was that surprised that she hasn’t. Still, there’s something valuable in Swift’s very public and articulate desire to rerecord all the music she let be sold out from under her back when she was still paying her dues. As strange as it may be to describe an artist well on her way to her first billion as a “volunteer,” the very concept of her ongoing “Taylor’s Version” project is to ask her fans to make the choice to support a creator over the labels and producers (and private equity capital) that hoovered up her music and continue to leech off of it. The narrative is good: Support Taylor, the artist we love, rather than the various bullying and abusive men—she asserts—who have captured the rights to work they had no real part in creating.
The irony is that the hostage negotiation works both ways. The more that fans are taught that consuming really means supporting the artists that they love—and that if they don’t pay out, their loved ones will die—the more the underlying logic becomes clear, and its violent, infuriating, exploitative injustice. In the short term, the owners might still laugh all the way to the bank, and we’re all still throwing our money at studios and multinationals and billionaires in hopes that some fraction of it trickles down to the people who make art.
But in the long term, they help us all see which side we’re on: the side of culture and creatives and people who actually make things with their labor. The image of famous and wealthy pop stars and celebrities has often made it hard to see that most artists tend to labor in working-class penury, the rule to the celebrity exception. But maybe the idea of multimillionaires standing on a picket line no longer seems like a punchline when we see Fran Drescher—whose most beloved role was cosplaying as a nanny—explaining the labor theory of value, or Alan Ruck inveighing against the “captains of industry” who see human beings as “natural resources” to be managed and exploited, or Ron Perlman offering to come to Bob Iger’s house to help him understand the value of a secure place of residence. In the hot labor summer of 2023, the idea that Taylor Swift might stand with striking hotel workers seems almost plausible. And why wouldn’t her fans expect her to? If they’re standing with her, as a creative laborer, why shouldn’t they get the same solidarity from her? It’s hers, it’s mine, it’s ours.
