headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.

To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.

During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.

the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?

Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.

The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.

"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.

Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.

A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.

it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.

Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work

The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.

Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.

getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).

Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.

Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.

Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.

there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.

Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.

Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.

Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.

The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.

One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.

when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.

Earlier this month, the Gender Equity Policy Institute released a new analysis of the 2022 Time Use Survey, administered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Time Use Survey is not perfect or granular, but it’s widely understood as the best and broadest data set of how Americans allocate their time. The survey asks respondents where and how they worked, how much time they allocated to childcare and/or domestic tasks, and how many hours were dedicated to “leisure.” You can take a closer look at the survey methodology and results here — and while they do breakdown results by race, age, income, education level, marital status, occupation, and number of children in the household, they do not distinguish between heterosexual and queer relationships (and also divide gender as male or female)….which means this analysis does not account for how queer relationships, in so many meanings of the word, fit into this larger analysis. With that said — the findings are stunning.

women spend more than twice as much time allocated to household work than men, even when they are single or do not have children. And getting married doesn’t split the load for women, as it theoretically would, but increases it: married women without children still do 2.3 times as much housework labor as their husbands.

men just had to hunt, but women back at the cave had to tend fires and care for kids and tan animal hides blah blah blah etc etc etc. These narratives make the nonsensical make sense: how else would you explain dramatically different approaches to cleanliness that seem to be fairly neatly divided by gender? It has to be biological, otherwise, well, women have just been caring about things that ultimately matter very little for centuries.

this particular argument falls apart when you consider women who aren’t “naturally” good at cleaning, or multi-tasking, or even caregiving — or just don’t like it. (Hello, all the ADHDers in my DMs also responding to these stats). Within this framework, the only way to conceive of these women is as faulty specimens: people who would be weeded out by natural selection. And yet somehow these people are still here, being women!

“Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective — what’s the power angle on this — often explains things,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Darcy Lockman in All the Rage. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”

cleaning can be pleasurable the same way that popping a zit is pleasurable. It’s gross but oddly cathartic to erase abjection and mess, or to create order out of chaos. But you cannot separate the pleasures of degreasing the stove top from the pleasures of successfully meeting the demands of proper performance of womanhood. It’s like people who say they “just like being thin.” So much of why you like it is because it grants you societal power.

men can clean! I know men who are good at it, who take pleasure in it, who are also excellent noticers and multitaskers — and almost all of them were either 1) raised by single mothers or 2) spent time in the military. They were socialized, over an extended period, to understand cleanliness and multi-tasking as essential — with personal and social consequences if they did not.

“When people come over and our house is a mess, I feel this reflects badly on me as a person, adult, wife, and mother. My husband doesn't feel that at all,” a reader named Leah told me. “My father-in-law once told my husband he wished our house was cleaner when he comes to visit (don’t get me started). So now I scour the place top to bottom. My husband just shrugs and says: whatever, my dad can deal with it. The same applies to our kid. My husband can send him to school in ripped, dirty, or too-small clothes and not worry what people will think of him and his parenting skills. Me? I’m worried they are about to call CPS on us.”

if you’re “safe” being bad at womanhood — you can blow off societal repercussions. But a messy or dirty domestic space intersects with so many other stereotypes of class, race, education level, body size, and marital status. “My grandma grew up extremely poor in the South and I’ve always felt there was a strong class element to her standard of cleanliness,” a woman named Aimee told me. “Like even if you had no money, get a broom and a rag because you at least need a clean house.”

Or: a single woman can have a dirty apartment if she’s a hot, dirty mess; take away the hot thinness and she’s just a slovenly cat lady spinster.

I don’t think most people believe this! Yet these understandings endure, asking women to feel like failures or oddities, setting up shop in our relationships and slowly festering.

It is tremendously hard to divest from a way of understanding your own value in the world — and, by extension, others.

Men are socialized to see their spaces as utilitarian, spaces that serve them. Women, we serve our spaces.”

We can attempt, as a society, to socialize boys and men to be more clean, to notice more, to multitask more, to spend more time on domestic tasks and to allocate less time to leisure. We can teach men that their value (and their morality) is also rooted in their capacity to maintain a clean home: that they should also serve their spaces.

some of this work has happened: men in their 30s and 40s today do more domestic labor than their grandparents or great-grandparents did. But the gender discrepancy in domestic labor closed and closed and then….got stuck at a 65/35 split, and hasn’t budged in years.

The math just doesn’t math when it comes to domestic labor. When dads start allocating more time to parenting, it doesn’t subtract from the time moms spent parenting. When women leave the home to work for pay, the number of hours they allocate to domestic tasks doesn’t decrease, as one might assume, but goes up. If men do more, women still…..do more.

If you feel bound by these expectations: what would it take to free you? Because when I survey the hundreds of responses that arrived in my DMS when I posted the stats above, what I felt most was fatigue. Just look in the fucking drawer, is that where the bras go??? one woman wrote. God I’m so tired.

I’m always suspicious of arguments that ask anyone who’s subjugated, in some way, to do more. But in this case, the work is difficult, particularly for bourgeois women, because the work feels like something we’re so rarely asked to do: less.

At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.

I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood

we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age. The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices.

The closest-knit communities were those in our childhood, ages 4 to 7. The happiest families, most moral society and most reliable news reporting came in our early formative years — ages 8 through 11. The best economy, as well as the best radio, television and movies, happened in our early teens — ages 12 through 15.

almost without exception, if you ask an American when times were worst, the most common response will be “right now!” This holds true even when “now” is clearly not the right answer. For example, when we ask which decade had the worst economy, the most common answer is today. The Great Depression — when, for much of a decade, unemployment exceeded the what we saw in the worst month of pandemic shutdowns — comes in a grudging second.

measure after measure, Republicans were more negative about the current decade than any other group — even low-income folks in objectively difficult situations.

Hsu and her friends spent the first part of 2024 asking 2,400 Americans where they get their information about the economy. In a new analysis, she found Republicans who listen to partisan outlets are more likely to be negative, and Democrats who listen to their own version of such news are more positive — and that Republicans are a bit more likely to follow partisan news.

Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.

Anyone who makes a living through  delicate and varied movements guided by situation specific know-how can expect to work for much longer than five more years. Thus, electricians, gardeners, plumbers, jewelry makers, hair stylists, as well as those who repair ironwork or make stained glass might find their handiwork contributing to our society for many more years to come

Finally, I expect there to be jobs where humans are preferred to AIs even if the AIs can do the job equally well, or perhaps even if they can do it better. This will apply to jobs where something is gained from the very fact that a human is doing it—likely because it involves the consumer feeling like they have a relationship with the human worker as a human. Jobs that might fall into this category include counselors, doulas, caretakers for the elderly, babysitters, preschool teachers, priests and religious leaders, even sex workers—much has been made of AI girlfriends, but I still expect that a large percentage of buyers of in-person sexual services will have a strong preference for humans. Some have called these jobs “nostalgic jobs.”

It does seem that, overall, unemployment makes people sadder, sicker, and more anxious. But it isn’t clear if this is an inherent fact of unemployment, or a contingent one. It is difficult to isolate the pure psychological effects of being unemployed, because at present these are confounded with the financial effects—if you lose your job, you have less money—which produce stress that would not exist in the context of, say, universal basic income. It is also confounded with the “shame” aspect of being fired or laid off—of not working when you really feel you should be working—as opposed to the context where essentially all workers have been displaced.

One study that gets around the “shame” confounder of unemployment is “A Forced Vacation? The Stress of Being Temporarily Laid Off During a Pandemic” by Scott Schieman, Quan Mai, and Ryu Won Kang. This study looked at Canadian workers who were temporarily laid off several months into the COVID-19 pandemic. They first assumed that such a disruption would increase psychological distress, but instead found that the self-reported wellbeing was more in line with the “forced vacation hypothesis,” suggesting that temporarily laid-off workers might initially experience lower distress due to the unique circumstances of the pandemic.

By May 2020, the distress gap observed in April had vanished, indicating that being temporarily laid off was not associated with higher distress during these months. The interviews revealed that many workers viewed being left without work as a “forced vacation,” appreciating the break from work-related stress and valuing the time for self-care and family. The widespread nature of layoffs normalized the experience, reducing personal blame and fostering a sense of shared experience. Financial strain was mitigated by government support, personal savings, and reduced spending, which buffered against potential distress.

The study suggests that the context and available support systems can significantly alter the psychological outcomes of unemployment—which seems promising for AGI-induced unemployment.

From the studies on plant closures and pandemic layoffs, it seems that shame plays a role in making people unhappy after unemployment, which implies that they might be happier in full automation-induced unemployment, since it would be near-universal and not signify any personal failing.

A final piece that reveals a societal-psychological aspect to how much work is deemed necessary is that the amount has changed over time! The number of hours that people have worked has declined over the past 150 years. Work hours tend to decline as a country gets richer. It seems odd to assume that the current accepted amount of work of roughly 40 hours a week is the optimal amount. The 8-hour work day, weekends, time off—hard-fought and won by the labor movement!—seem to have been triumphs for human health and well-being. Why should we assume that stopping here is right? Why should we assume that less work was better in the past, but less work now would be worse?

Removing the shame that accompanies unemployment by removing the sense that one ought to be working seems one way to make people happier during unemployment. Another is what they do with their free time. Regardless of how one enters unemployment, one still confronts empty and often unstructured time.

One paper, titled “Having Too Little or Too Much Time Is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being” by Marissa A. Sharif, Cassie Mogilner, and Hal E. Hershfield tried to explore whether it was possible to have “too much” leisure time.

The paper concluded that it is possible to have too little discretionary time, but also possible to have too much, and that moderate amounts of discretionary time seemed best for subjective well-being. More time could be better, or at least not meaningfully worse, provided it was spent on “social” or “productive” leisure activities. This suggests that how people fare psychologically with their post-AGI unemployment will depend heavily on how they use their time, not how much of it there is

Automation-induced unemployment could feel like retiring depending on how total it is. If essentially no one is working, and no one feels like they should be working, it might be more akin to retirement, in that it would lack the shameful element of feeling set apart from one’s peers.

Women provide another view on whether formal work is good for happiness. Women are, for the most part, relatively recent entrants to the formal labor market. In the U.S., 18% of women were in the formal labor force in 1890. In 2016, 57% were. Has labor force participation made them happier? By some accounts: no. A paper that looked at subjective well-being for U.S. women from the General Social Survey between the 1970s and 2000s—a time when labor force participation was climbing—found both relative and absolute declines in female happiness.

I think women’s work and AI is a relatively optimistic story. Women have been able to automate unpleasant tasks via technological advances, while the more meaningful aspects of their work seem less likely to be automated away.  When not participating in the formal labor market, women overwhelmingly fill their time with childcare and housework. The time needed to do housework has declined over time due to tools like washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers. These tools might serve as early analogous examples of the future effects of AI: reducing unwanted and burdensome work to free up time for other tasks deemed more necessary or enjoyable.

it seems less likely that AIs will so thoroughly automate childcare and child-rearing because this “work” is so much more about the relationship between the parties involved. Like therapy, childcare and teaching seems likely to be one of the forms of work where a preference for a human worker will persist the longest.

In the early modern era, landed gentry and similar were essentially unemployed. Perhaps they did some minor administration of their tenants, some dabbled in politics or were dragged into military projects, but compared to most formal workers they seem to have worked relatively few hours. They filled the remainder of their time with intricate social rituals like balls and parties, hobbies like hunting, studying literature, and philosophy, producing and consuming art, writing letters, and spending time with friends and family. We don’t have much real well-being survey data from this group, but, hedonically, they seem to have been fine. Perhaps they suffered from some ennui, but if we were informed that the great mass of humanity was going to enter their position, I don’t think people would be particularly worried.

I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy.

Although a trained therapist might be able to counsel my friends or family through their troubles better, I still do it, because there is value in me being the one to do so. We can think of this as the relational reason for doing something others can do better. I write because sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I think it betters me. I know others do so better, but I don’t care—at least not all the time. The reasons for this are part hedonic and part virtue or morality.  A renowned AI researcher once told me that he is practicing for post-AGI by taking up activities that he is not particularly good at: jiu-jitsu, surfing, and so on, and savoring the doing even without excellence. This is how we can prepare for our future where we will have to do things from joy rather than need, where we will no longer be the best at them, but will still have to choose how to fill our days.

now the streaming gold rush—the era that made Dickinson—is over. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of nearly free credit, and at roughly the same time, Wall Street began calling in the streamers’ bets. The stock prices of nearly all the major companies with streaming platforms took precipitous falls, and none have rebounded to their prior valuation.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays—many of which would never be made—was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor—multiple steps of development—for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: “Free work was encoded.” So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer’s drafts. As Rodman explained it: “Your producer says to you, ‘I love your script. It’s a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn’t it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.’ And you do it.”

By 2019, the major Hollywood agencies had been consolidated into an oligopoly of four companies that controlled more than 75 percent of WGA writers’ earnings. And in the 2010s, high finance reached the agencies: by 2014, private equity had acquired Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, and the latter had purchased IMG. Meeting benchmarks legible to the new bosses—deals actually made, projects off the ground—pushed agents to function more like producers, and writers began hearing that their asking prices were too high.

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest, he said. “There’s a sort of dry run for the story.” Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, “It’s a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.”

Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.” At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story.

Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show.

The streaming ecosystem was built on a wager: high subscriber numbers would translate to large market shares, and eventually, profit. Under this strategy, an enormous amount of money could be spent on shows that might or might not work: more shows meant more opportunities to catch new subscribers. Producers and writers for streamers were able to put ratings aside, which at first seemed to be a luxury. Netflix paid writers large fees up front, and guaranteed that an entire season of a show would be produced. By the mid-2010s, the sheer quantity of series across the new platforms—what’s known as “Peak TV”—opened opportunities for unusually offbeat projects (see BoJack Horseman, a cartoon for adults about an equine has-been sitcom star), and substantially more shows created by women and writers of color. In 2009, across cable, broadcast, and streaming, 189 original scripted shows aired or released new episodes; in 2016, that number was 496. In 2022, it was 849.

supply soon overshot demand. For those who beat out the competition, the work became much less steady than it had been in the pre-streaming era. According to insiders, in the past, writers for a series had usually been employed for around eight months, crafting long seasons and staying on board through a show’s production. Junior writers often went to the sets where their shows were made and learned how to take a story from the page to the screen—how to talk to actors, how to stay within budget, how to take a studio’s notes—setting them up to become showrunners. Now, in an innovation called mini-rooms, reportedly first ventured by cable channels such as AMC and Starz, fewer writers were employed for each series and for much shorter periods—usually eight to ten weeks but as little as four.

Writers in the new mini-room system were often dismissed before their series went to production, which meant that they rarely got the opportunity to go to set and weren’t getting the skills they needed to advance. Showrunners were left responsible for all writing-related tasks when these rooms shut down. “It broke a lot of showrunners,” the A-list film and TV writer told me. “Physically, mentally, financially. It also ruined a lot of shows.”

The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, “It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater—you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.” Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, “There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I’ve worked doing data entry, I’ve worked doing research, I’ve worked doing copywriting.” Since he’d started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he’d never had more than eight months at a time when he didn’t need a source of income from outside the industry.

“There was this feeling,” the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, “during the last ten years or so, of, ‘Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers’ rooms.’ ” But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. “They’re getting the shot, but you don’t actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.”

“The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,” Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. “Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.” Grote said much the same thing: “Prestige TV wasn’t new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.”

The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers “in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.” As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. “I am not impressed,” the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, “is still a subsistence-level job,” he said. “It’s a job for rich kids.”

Brenden Gallagher, who echoed Conover’s belief that the union was well-positioned to gain more in 2026, put it this way: “My view is that there was a lot of wishful thinking about achieving this new middle class, based around, to paraphrase 30 Rock, making it 1997 again through science or magic. Will there be as big a working television-writer cohort that is making six figures a year consistently living in Los Angeles as there was from 1992 to 2021? No. That’s never going to come back.”

As for what types of TV and movies can get made by those who stick around, Kelvin Yu, creator and showrunner of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, told me: “I think that there will be an industry move to the middle in terms of safer, four-quadrant TV.” (In L.A., a “four-quadrant” project is one that aims to appeal to all demographics.) “I think a lot of people,” he said, “who were disenfranchised or marginalized—their drink tickets are up.” Indeed, multiple writers and executives told me that following the strike, studio choices have skewed even more conservative than before. “It seems like buyers are much less adventurous,” one writer said. “Buyers are looking for Friends.”

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television.

The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector. Writers will have to fight the studios again, but for more sweeping reforms. One change in particular has the potential to flip the power structure of the industry on its head: writers could demand to own complete copyright for the stories they create. They currently have something called “separated rights,” which allow a writer to use a script and its characters for limited purposes. But if they were to retain complete copyright, they would have vastly more leverage. Nearly every writer I spoke with seemed to believe that this would present a conflict with the way the union functions. This point is complicated and debatable, but Shawna Kidman and the legal expert Catherine Fisk—both preeminent scholars of copyright and media—told me that the greater challenge is Hollywood’s structure. The business is currently built around studio ownership. While Kidman found the idea of writer ownership infeasible, Fisk said it was possible, though it would be extremely difficult. Pushing for copyright would essentially mean going to war with the studios. But if things continue on their current path, writers may have to weigh such hazards against the prospect of the end of their profession. Or, they could leave it all behind.

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

The importance of user-centricity, demands a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. We live in a world where your smartphone can warn you to leave early for your next appointment because of traffic, and your house knows when you’ll be home and therefore when to turn on the heat. The boundaries between products and services are merging into integrated experiences.

Our research suggests that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. One of the strongest correlations we uncovered linked top financial performers and companies that said they could break down functional silos and integrate designers with other functions. This was particularly notable in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) businesses, where respondents from companies that were top-quartile integrators reported compound annual growth rates some seven percentage points above those that were weakest in this respect.

A generation ago, small, independent operations defined the entire industry. Today, the businesses of beef, pork, and poultry slaughter are all dominated by four giants at the national level. But that greatly understates the problem, as in many regions, a single corporation holds a complete monopoly. Two firms, Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America control as much as 80-90 percent of the milk supply chain in some states and wield substantial influence across the entire industry. As our Food & Power website details, the story is much the same in food-processing, egg production, grain production, and produce farming.

Monopolists have captured control over many lines of manufacturing as well. Corning, an American glass manufacturer, sells 60 percent of all the glass used in LCD screens, and Owens Illinois holds a near monopoly over market for glass bottles in the US. Rexam, a British company, holds a dominant position over the international supply of bottle caps and pharmaceutical bottles.

Hospital corporations across America have also been buying up physician practices in recent years. Hospital ownership of physician practices more than doubled between 2004 and 2011, from 24 to 49 percent. In drug stores, meanwhile, the pending takeover of Rite Aid by Walgreen’s would reduce the market to two giants, along with CVS.

Pharmaceutical companies have been merging at a record pace in recent years, and drug makers often use their concentrated market power to raise the prices of generic drugs, such as Digoxin, Daraprim, Naloxone, and standard vaccines.

Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators. Maytag also controls the Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, and KitchenAid brands and holds a dominant position over supply of Sears Kenmore products.

The FTC successfully blocked a proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, but the market is still highly concentrated after Office Depot’s 2013 acquisition of Office Max. Collectively, the two firms control 69 percent of the entire office supplies market.

China’s vitamin cartel controls 100 percent of the market for U.S. Vitamin C, which is also known as ascorbic acid and which is used in almost all preserved foods.

Indeed, the rise of hyperindividualism has fragmented our connections, scattering our relationships across the country. Even today’s modern self-care trends turn us inward, convincing us to “hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.” And the numbers don’t lie: Americans are spending more and more time alone and less and less time with their friends.

When asked how often they decide not to post on social media out of fear of it being using against them, older teen girls stand out. For example, half of 15- to 17-year-old girls say they often or sometimes decide not to post something on social media because they worry others might use it to embarrass them, compared with smaller shares of younger girls or boys.

While 9% of teens think social media has had a mostly negative effect on them personally, that share rises to 32% when the same question is framed about people their age.

this survey reveals that only a minority of teens say they have been civically active on social media in the past year via one of the three means asked about at the time of the survey. One-in-ten teens say they have encouraged others to take action on political or social issues that are important to them or have posted a picture to show their support for a political or social issue in the past 12 months.

larger shares of Democrats than Republicans say they have posted pictures or used hashtags to show support for a political or social issue in the past year. In total, Democratic teens are twice as likely as Republican teens to have engaged in any of these activities during this time (20% vs. 10%).

Not only do small shares of teens participate in these types of activities on social media, relatively few say these platforms play a critical role in how they interact with political and social issues.

18% of Democratic teens say social media is extremely or very important to them when it comes to exposing them to new points of view, compared with 8% of Republican teens.

Despite feeling a lack of control over their data being collected by social media companies, teens are largely unconcerned. A fifth of teens (20%) say they feel very or extremely concerned about the amount of their personal information social media companies might have. Still, a notable segment of teens – 44% – say they have little or no concern about how much these companies might know about them.

what I think the Know Your Meme report illustrates so well is that we’re now currently in a world where we have two different kinds of social platforms: Ones that make new culture and ones that consume that culture. And, according to the report, the two most important platforms for creating new internet culture (which is now just pop culture) are Twitter and TikTok.In fact, according to Know Your Meme, about 60% of the memes we’ve seen in 2022 were created by Twitter or TikTok. And the three biggest apps behind those two —YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram — all trail far behind, contributing around 10% each.

Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)