Sunshine and Olly

by Jonathan Blaustein

Transitions are hard.

Honestly, of all the life phases, few are tougher.

And I’m in the middle of one.

But so are many of my colleagues: photographers, writers, artists, journalists.

Everyone is suffering right now, and I’ve begun to get those reports, piecemeal.

Certainly, when I shared my own work struggles here, people DM’d and texted, saying it wasn’t just me.

But of course it’s not just me!

The layoff reports are in the news. The very news that is the source of the employment now being cut.

BuzzFeed News gets chopped, ENTIRELY, and then I read an NYT piece in which Jonah Peretti openly embraces AI to “enhance its news business” instead.

It’s like a sick joke inside a scary sci-fi movie.

The computers are here for your jobs.

Good luck.

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But of course that’s not true.

Storytellers are teachers, entertainers, leaders, guides.

We live human experience, and strive to understand it, before reporting back, giving insight in digestible bits.

These are things a computer LITERALLY cannot do, given its inherent lack of humanity.

Sartre believed what we do, how we act, determines what kind of human we are.

Nice talk, but shitty behavior, and you’re a shitty person.

His seminal play, “No Exit,” foreshadowed my own pandemic experience to such a degree, I’d like to exhume the man and shake his hand.

Can you imagine?

Shaking Sartre’s skeleton hand?

“Thanks, bro! Appreciate you! BTW, ‘The Stranger’ was fucking dope too!”

(If only.)

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My point today is, our collective struggles are a function of Late-Stage Capitalism.

There are fewer and fewer resources available to the arts, and media.

Who buys expensive prints to hang on the wall anymore?

The collectors became artists, and hung their own work on the wall instead.

(Please don’t doubt me on that.)

And it’s not just us.

If you consider the streaming wars bloat lead to massive contractions, and a writer’s strike, you’d have to say things are worse in entertainment as well.

These days, a few star creators seem to get all the gigs. (Be they photographers, writers, directors, show-runners…)

Back at the “newspapers,” staffers cling to their careers, knowing if they get a pink slip, they might not get another job in the industry.

If all you know is art, or journalism, if it was your life’s dream, what do you do next?

Personally, I told you guys at the blog’s inception I was writing a novel, and I’m about 85% done with the first draft.

Will it be as good as I hope?

Will it matter, even if it’s great?

Who can say?

I know one thing, though.

There is no way on God’s Fucking Earth that a computer could write my story.

I promise you that.