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.

a more powerful aim is to develop a new medium for thought. A medium such as, say, Adobe Illustrator is essentially different from any of the individual tools Illustrator contains. Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.

Memory systems make memory into a choice, rather than an event left up to chance: This changes the relationship to what we're learning, reduces worry, and frees up attention to focus on other kinds of learning, including conceptual, problem-solving, and creative.

Memory systems can be used to build genuine conceptual understanding, not just learn facts: In Quantum Country we achieve this in part through the aspiration to virtuoso card writing, and in part through a narrative embedding of spaced repetition that gradually builds context and understanding.

Mnemonic techniques such as memory palaces are great, but not versatile enough to build genuine conceptual understanding: Such techniques are very specialized, and emphasize artificial connections, not the inherent connections present in much conceptual knowledge. The mnemonic techniques are, however, useful for bootstrapping knowledge with an ad hoc structure.

What practices would lead to tools for thought as transformative as Hindu-Arabic numerals? And in what ways does modern design practice and tech industry product practice fall short? To be successful, you need an insight-through-making loop to be operating at full throttle, combining the best of deep research culture with the best of Silicon Valley product culture.

Historically, work on tools for thought has focused principally on cognition; much of the work has been stuck in Spock-space. But it should take emotion as seriously as the best musicians, movie directors, and video game designers. Mnemonic video is a promising vehicle for such explorations, possibly combining both deep emotional connection with the detailed intellectual mastery the mnemonic medium aspires toward.

It's striking to contrast conventional technical books with the possibilities enabled by executable books. You can imagine starting an executable book with, say, quantum teleportation, right on the first page. You'd provide an interface – perhaps a library is imported – that would let users teleport quantum systems immediately. They could experiment with different parts of the quantum teleportation protocol, illustrating immediately the most striking ideas about it. The user wouldn't necessarily understand all that was going on. But they'd begin to internalize an accurate picture of the meaning of teleportation. And over time, at leisure, the author could unpack some of what might a priori seem to be the drier details. Except by that point the reader will be bought into those details, and they won't be so dry

Aspiring to canonicity, one fun project would be to take the most recent IPCC climate assessment report (perhaps starting with a small part), and develop a version which is executable. Instead of a report full of assertions and references, you'd have a live climate model – actually, many interrelated models – for people to explore. If it was good enough, people would teach classes from it; if it was really superb, not only would they teach classes from it, it could perhaps become the creative working environment for many climate scientists.

In serious mediums, there's a notion of canonical media. By this, we mean instances of the medium that expand its range, and set a new standard widely known amongst creators in that medium. For instance, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and 2001 all expanded the range of film, and inspired later film makers. It's also true in new media. YouTubers like Grant Sanderson have created canonical videos: they expand the range of what people think is possible in the video form. And something like the Feynman Lectures on Physics does it for textbooks. In each case one gets the sense of people deeply committed to what they're doing. In many of his lectures it's obvious that Feynman isn't just educating: he's reporting the results of a lifelong personal obsession with understanding how the world works. It's thrilling, and it expands the form.

There's a general principle here: good tools for thought arise mostly as a byproduct of doing original work on serious problems.

Game companies develop many genuinely new interface ideas. This perhaps seems surprising, since you'd expect such interface ideas to also suffer from the public goods problem: game designers need to invest enormous effort to develop those interface ideas, and they are often immediately copied (and improved on) by other companies, at little cost. In that sense, they are public goods, and enrich the entire video game ecosystem.

Many video games make most of their money from the first few months of sales. While other companies can (and do) come in and copy or riff on any new ideas, it often does little to affect revenue from the original game, which has already made most of its money In fact, cloning is a real issue in gaming, especially in very technically simple games. An example is the game Threes, which took the developers more than a year to make. Much of that time was spent developing beautiful new interface ideas. The resulting game was so simple that clones and near-clones began appearing within days. One near clone, a game called 2048, sparked a mini-craze, and became far more successful than Threes. At the other extreme, some game companies prolong the revenue-generating lifetime of their games with re-releases, long-lived online versions, and so on. This is particularly common for capital-intensive AAA games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series. In such cases the business model relies less on clever new ideas, and more on improved artwork (for re-release), network effects (for online versions), and branding. . While this copying is no doubt irritating for the companies being copied, it's still worth it for them to make the up-front investment.

in gaming, clever new interface ideas can be distinguishing features which become a game's primary advantage in the marketplace. Indeed, new interface ideas may even help games become classics – consider the many original (at the time) ideas in games ranging from Space Invaders to Wolfenstein 3D to Braid to Monument Valley. As a result, rather than underinvesting, many companies make sizeable investments in developing new interface ideas, even though they then become public goods. In this way the video game industry has largely solved the public goods problems.

It's encouraging that the video game industry can make inroads on the public goods problem. Is there a solution for tools for thought? Unfortunately, the novelty-based short-term revenue approach of the game industry doesn't work. You want people to really master the best new tools for thought, developing virtuoso skill, not spend a few dozen hours (as with most games) getting pretty good, and then moving onto something new.

Adobe shares in common with many other software companies that much of their patenting is defensive: they patent ideas so patent trolls cannot sue them for similar ideas. The situation is almost exactly the reverse of what you'd like. Innovative companies can easily be attacked by patent trolls who have made broad and often rather vague claims in a huge portfolio of patents, none of which they've worked out in much detail. But when the innovative companies develop (at much greater cost) and ship a genuinely good new idea, others can often copy the essential core of that idea, while varying it enough to plausibly evade any patent. The patent system is not protecting the right things.

many of the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought do suffer the public goods problem. And that means tech companies focus elsewhere; it means many imaginative and ambitious people decide to focus elsewhere; it means we haven't developed the powerful practices needed to do work in the area, and a result the field is still in a pre-disciplinary stage. The result, ultimately, is that it means the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought are undersupplied.

Culturally, tech is dominated by an engineering, goal-driven mindset. It's much easier to set KPIs, evaluate OKRs, and manage deliverables, when you have a very specific end-goal in mind. And so it's perhaps not surprising that tech culture is much more sympathetic to AGI and BCI as overall programs of work. But historically it's not the case that humanity's biggest breakthroughs have come about in this goal-driven way. The creation of language – the ur tool for thought – is perhaps the most important occurrence of humanity's existence. And although the origin of language is hotly debated and uncertain, it seems extremely unlikely to have been the result of a goal-driven process. It's amusing to try imagining some prehistoric quarterly OKRs leading to the development of language. What sort of goals could one possibly set? Perhaps a quota of new irregular verbs? It's inconceivable!

Even the computer itself came out of an exploration that would be regarded as ridiculously speculative and poorly-defined in tech today. Someone didn't sit down and think “I need to invent the computer”; that's not a thought they had any frame of reference for. Rather, pioneers such as Alan Turing and Alonzo Church were exploring extremely basic and fundamental (and seemingly esoteric) questions about logic, mathematics, and the nature of what is provable. Out of those explorations the idea of a computer emerged, after many years; it was a discovered concept, not a goal.

Fundamental, open-ended questions seem to be at least as good a source of breakthroughs as goals, no matter how ambitious. This is difficult to imagine or convince others of in Silicon Valley's goal-driven culture. Indeed, we ourselves feel the attraction of a goal-driven culture. But empirically open-ended exploration can be just as, or more successful.

There's a lot of work on tools for thought that takes the form of toys, or “educational” environments. Tools for writing that aren't used by actual writers. Tools for mathematics that aren't used by actual mathematicians. And so on. Even though the creators of such tools have good intentions, it's difficult not to be suspicious of this pattern. It's very easy to slip into a cargo cult mode, doing work that seems (say) mathematical, but which actually avoids engagement with the heart of the subject. Often the creators of these toys have not ever done serious original work in the subjects for which they are supposedly building tools. How can they know what needs to be included?

I wrote five scripts during my season and a half on TZ, and I was deeply involved in every aspect of every one of them.   I did not just write my script, turn it in, and go away.   I sat in on the casting sessions.   I worked with the directors.   I was present at the table reads.   “The Last Defender of Camelot” was the first of my scripts to go into production, and I was on set every day.   I watched the stuntmen rehearse the climactic sword fight (in the lobby of the ST ELSEWHERE set, as it turned out), and I was present when they shot that scene and someone zigged when he should have zagged and a stuntman’s nose was cut off… a visceral lesson as to the kind of thing that can go wrong.   With Phil and Jim and Harvey Frand (our line producer, another great guy who taught me a lot), I watched dailies every day.    After the episode was in the can, I sat in on some post-production, and watched the editors work their magic.   I learned from them too.

Streamers and shortened seasons have blown the ladder to splinters.   The way it works now, a show gets put in development, the showrunner assembles a “mini-room,” made up of a couple of senior writers and a couple newcomers, they meet for a month or two, beat out the season, break down the episodes, go off and write scripts, reassemble, get notes, give notes, rewrite, rinse and repeat… and finally turn into the scripts.   And show is greenlit (or not, some shows never get past the room) and sent into production.  The showrunner and his second, maybe his second and his third, take it from there.   The writer producers.   The ones who already know all the things that I learned on TWILIGHT ZONE. The junior writers?  They’re not there.   Once they delivered their scripts and did a revision of two, they were paid, sent home, their salary ended.   They are off looking for another gig.

In many cases they won’t be asked to set even when the episodes they wrote are being filmed.   (They may be ALLOWED on set, if the showrunner and execs are cool with that, but only as a visitor, with no authority, no role.   And no pay, of course.   They may even be told they are not allowed to speak to the actors).

One of the things the AMPTP put forward in their last offer to the WGA is that some writers might be brought onto sets as unpaid interns, to “shadow” and “observe.”   Even that will not be an absolute right.   Maybe they will be let in, maybe not.   These are the people who wrote the stories being filmed, who created the characters, who wrote the words the actors are saying.   I was WAY more than that in 1985, and so was every other staff writer in television at the time.

Mini-rooms are abominations, and the refusal of the AMPTP to pay writers to stay with their shows through production — as part of the JOB, for which they need to be paid, not as a tourist —  is not only wrong, it is incredibly short sighted.   If the Story Editors of 2023 are not allowed to get any production experience, where do the studios think the Showrunners of 2033 are going to come from?