|
We cannot recall nostalgically the year 2025 without touching on that painful affair known as the Last Writers' Strike. The industry was expanding, and with growing pains came conflict. An upsurge of greed provoked the writers' union to demand a bigger share of cyber-residuals. The real sticking-point was fear of that new technology, then in its infancy, namely thought-transfer or ESP publishing, which threatened to cut the authors out of their share of the publishing pie. (We see in retrospect that these fears were largely unfounded.) In any case, the Writers' Union Council of Elders, controlled by the "Three Jonathans Troika," also known as the "Alte Kacker Adolescents," so called because of their lifelong skillful mining of material about the trauma of teenage years, called for a strike. Eventually, the union split apart, when these elders were challenged by the Young Turks, led by Edgar Mailer, Tama Updike and several other grandchildren of famous writers. The Young Turks questioned the whole idea of individual authorship and hence regarded residuals as communal property.
|
