The Revolt of the Bosses

On the anti-PMC counterrevolution

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At the heart of the WGA writer’s strike (which the editorial board of The Bristlecone wholeheartedly endorses) is a standard labor dispute: writers want to be appropriately compensated for their labor, while their employers want to drive down labor costs to virtually nothing and keep all the surplus value for themselves. One of the tools the aforementioned employers can use to suppress labor costs—at least hypothetically—is large language model software like GPT-4.1 Who needs screenwriters when you can type “pilot episode, succession spinoff where colin the bodyguard fights crime” and get something that pretty much looks like a script for an hour-long television program?

The appeal of a post-writer future for someone like Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is obvious. What’s a little more mystifying is why so many people with no direct stake in the labor dispute have come down firmly on the side of the bosses. And why, for that matter, do so many pro-boss civilians seem to get a thrill out of imagining a future where GPT-4 writes all of their favorite movies and streaming shows?

Here’s a sample from this helpful roundup by John Herrman:

@profmjcleveland: "Strange that television writers decided to go on strike the same month as television producers figured out that ChatGPT could write a whole season of NCIS in about 15 minutes, but good luck to them I suppose."
@peterdrew: "Not sure, but their writers are going to find out real quick, someone lokw me could write the opening monologues for all four of them for a week with just basic commercial AI. And they'd most likely be funnier."
@Smokedaddy_3D: "Oh no, Hollywood in Panic mode? Fire up the AI, people."

And the lurid fantasies about a post-writer Hollywood aren’t just coming from blue check randos like @Smokedaddy_3D. Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent; Ben Shapiro and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon have also embraced the end of human-written streaming content.

As strange as it is to see anonymous tweeters white knighting for studio executives, it’s even stranger to see professional writers like Cleveland, Shapiro, and Dillon cheer on the collapse of writing as a profession.2 Clearly, something else is going on here.

If you asked the pro-boss contingent what this “something else” is, they would probably observe that Hollywood screenwriters are a bunch of leftists who are using their hegemonic cultural position to force woke propaganda down the throats of regular Americans — for example, by acknowledging the existence of queer people. This is the same charge they level against professors, journalists, corporate DEI staff, and, of course, civil servants. All of them are engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the will of real America.

But all these targets have something else in common. They’re all part of what is sometimes called the professional-managerial class. Over the past few years, this term has gotten used in a lot of different ways, but for our purposes, let’s start with the original Ehrenreich/Ehrenreich definition: “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” To de-Marxify our terms somewhat, let’s say that members of the PMC are those white-collar bureaucrats, in both public and private institutions, whose work is central to the ongoing maintenance of the capitalist knowledge economy. This definition holds even as many members of the PMC identify as anticapitalists and/or use “PMC” as a term of abuse for their ideological opponents.3

Note that while modern capitalism needs the PMC, that does not mean bosses and PMC workers always get along; quite the opposite. Bosses and their PMC employees are often in conflict, for reasons both ideological and non-ideological.4

I want to focus on two non-ideological reasons for this conflict. The first is the one most evident in the WGA strike: PMC knowledge workers need a certain degree of autonomy in order to do their jobs. The work of writing a screenplay simply can’t be regimented and surveilled to the same degree as, say, the work of moving items through an Amazon warehouse. This relative lack of regimentation and surveillance means that PMC employees have more power in their respective workplaces, even if padding the hours they spend on a particular task is sometimes the only way to exercise that power.

The second reason for conflict is that PMC workers are the ones most often charged with upholding the rules that keep a bureaucratic institution humming along. These rules constrain both workers and (albeit to a lesser extent) bosses. In a clash between human resources and an inappropriate boss, HR sometimes wins.

So to again modify our definition of the PMC, we could say they are white collar knowledge workers who (1) often enforce the rules of managerial capitalism, even against the interests of individual capitalists, and (2) have zones of autonomy that bosses can besiege but rarely annihilate.

This isn’t an especially new insight; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in the essay where they coined the term PMC, said that “the rationalizers of and managers of capitalist enterprises … are thrown into direct conflict with capitalist greed, irrationality, and social irresponsibility.” But the boss/PMC conflict seems to have gotten sharper in recent years. I don’t know for sure why that would be the case, but I think it can be chalked up to a confluence of factors, some more important than others:

  • Fractal inequality has increased the social distance between owners, managers, and white collar employees.

  • Educational polarization means the PMC has become more homogeneously left-liberal.

  • At the same time, the PMC has become gradually more diverse by other measures (race, gender, gender expression).

  • The rise of DEI infrastructure in corporate America has placed another constraint (albeit only a theoretical one in many cases) on the behavior of bosses.

  • Management of both public and private enterprise has become an extremely complex endeavor, largely carried out by specialists. These specialists often have greater knowledge of the systems they manage then their bosses, providing them with yet another form of power over their supposed betters.

  • At the same time, the apparent failure to properly manage these systems has eroded public trust, making certain wings of the PMC (for example, civil servants in public health departments) more vulnerable to attack.

  • The tight labor market of the past few years has put greater pressure on the untrammeled authority of bosses across the board.

  • While organized labor in the United States has been shrinking for decades, some of its strongest redoubts are in the white collar professions, most notably among public sector workers.

There are also a couple of complex interactions playing out between these various factors: the tight labor market has contributed to an increase in militant labor activity, including some major strikes initiated by white collar workers, including teachers, graduate students, journalists, and, of course, screenwriters. And while I won’t discuss it here, I do want to nod at the importance to this story of the shareholder revolution — and the ongoing transition to asset manager capitalism.

All of these factors have contributed to the rise of what the writer John Ganz has called “boss-ism,” or the notion that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.” Think of boss-ism as a sort of revolutionary consciousness among bosses who see their power being threatened.

Once you start to think of elite right-wing politics, you begin to see the revolt of the bosses playing out everywhere. Donald Trump’s war against the civil servants of the “deep state” is maybe the most prominent example, and a sort of leading indicator for the larger anti-PMC rebellion that was to follow. Note that if he were again to become president, one of the top priorities for Trump and his inner circle would be to completely destroy the political independence of the federal bureaucracy.

Similarly, Ron DeSantis’s attempt to model a sort of post-Trump Trumpism in Florida involved going to war with PMC types: co-opting the state university system, undermining the public health profession, and generally trying to frame corporate “wokeness” as the greatest evil confronting the United States today.

Moving onto the private sector, one of the biggest fronts in the revolt of the bosses has been Twitter. Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, his attempts to de-woke-ify it, and his decision to lay off most of the staff can all be seen as part of an attempt to re-assert the untrammeled will of the boss over a complex operation governed by impersonal rules and various nodes of authority. Musk has largely succeeded in transforming Twitter into an extension of his will, but at the expense of wrecking the platform.

And that brings us back to the writer’s strike. I have no idea whether any of the Hollywood executives on the other side of this strike are ideologically committed warriors in the revolt of the bosses. But it’s striking how many sincere reactionaries have glommed onto their cause. For some of them, it may be because they are themselves literal bosses. Others have more complex motives, or a simple yet unwholesome attachment to the notion that rich white guys like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump form a natural ruling class.5

But don’t underestimate the power of more prosaic forces. Some members of the PMC simply can’t play nice with their coworkers. Others see some advantage in sucking up to the boss. Remember the Twitter Files? That wasn’t very good journalism, but it was a decent short-term grift for resentful, alienated media workers who were willing to prostraste themselves before Elon Musk.

Granted, it’s a bit harder to understand what material advantage a non-boss would derive from rooting against the writer’s strike. After all, your standard Federalist writer is probably easier to replace with GPT-4 than the writing team behind a highly regarded scripted drama. So maybe the anti-WGA stance really is just pure ideology. If so, let it serve as yet another reminder that power-worship is a hell of a drug.