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pteryxSo this past weekend, I wrote a long, very angry letter to Paramount over Star Trek: Prodigy's pending cancellation... and more importantly, its being pulled from Paramount+ entirely rather than left available. Notably, this pulling is occurring before the already-practically-complete Season 2 is made available. Worse still, this is supposedly being done for the sake of a tax writeoff... something that has at least sometimes involved the actual destruction of the shows being written off.
Needless to say, the idea that it was even possible that Star Trek: Prodigy could be thrown into a bonfire as a sacrifice to the god of capitalism enraged me — and it would be far from the first corporate move in the past year to do so. This has been a year of destruction of communities, knowledge, and art, and of full-on assault against the ordinary, non-wealthy people who create and use such things by the billionaires and multimillionaires who use the products of others' hard work as poker chips. We all know about the sabotaging of Twitter, the invasive species that are "intelligent" text and image generation algorithms, and the intended take-backsies of the Reddit API and locking of it behind a ridiculously expensive paywall. For an example that hit closer to home for me, I had already been part of the fight against Wizards of the Coast's attempt to change the Open Gaming License; while that had the pleasantly surprising ending of WotC releasing the entire 5.1 SRD under the CC-BY license (rather than the likely-uncopyrightable excerpts they'd proposed releasing that way a week before that) to create a dual-licensing scheme, WotC then proceeded to blow the second chance they'd earned by sending the Pinkerton Detective Agency out to threaten and intimidate someone who'd received a misdelivered box of Magic cards.
If Square Enix or The LEGO Group goes evil on me too, I swear* that I'll find some way to invent an intercontinental guillotine.
* sarcastically, since the sworn action is not literally possible
In any case, in a year of peak corporate greed and billionaire hubris, I do not trust Paramount to do right by Star Trek: Prodigy by selling it to someone else or putting both full seasons out on Blu-Ray, particularly given how other companies have treated movies and TV shows that were written off for tax purposes. As such, the cancellation/pulling/tax writeoff news prompted me to write a very angry letter to Paramount... only to find that their online email form cut it off halfway through my second paragraph of nine. Thankfully, though, someone helpfully provided an appropriate snail mail address, so I printed my letter out on Sunday and sent it this past Monday. Now that it's been in the system long enough that it should hopefully already be postmarked, I am also going to post it here. That way, my communications will not simply be swallowed into a void of denial on Paramount's end, and the dates should confirm that my letter was not just "copied off the Internet".
To all Paramount board members, executive officers, and shareholders:
I am writing to you today concerning your recent decision to cancel the television show Star Trek: Prodigy and remove it from your Paramount+ service with only a week's warning, despite the pending completion of production of its second season, all in the name of securing a tax writeoff. I presume that you are expecting a child's plea to please keep airing their favorite TV show. Instead, the author of this particular letter is someone who has had the misfortune of being born in this empire in denial called the United States of America forty-five years ago, and has lived here since.
Star Trek is more than just a brand or a franchise — more than just TV shows, movies, and countless other creative works that have made money for decades. It is a vision, however imperfect, of how much better the US, the world, and humankind could be, if we would only leave behind baser impulses such as greed, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism and instead embrace our better natures. The Prime Directive, for example, is an early attempt at anticolonialist thinking; replicators represent the triumph of the common good over the selfish desire to perpetuate scarcity for the enrichment of a few; and Starfleet, despite often being pressed into a military role, is intended first and foremost as a scientific organization akin to NASA. Star Trek: Prodigy represents a better realization of this vision than more adult-oriented, prestige-inspired, "Middle America"-baiting series such as Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. As such, it deserves better marketing, not the chopping block.
Unfortunately, despite this vision inspiring millions, we do not live in a better society than we did in the 1960s. Since the mid-1970s, the wealthy have endeavored to claw back the general prosperity that the US enjoyed when the original Star Trek aired, and attempted to pin the blame for our decline upon the marginalized. These efforts have reached peak malice in the past year. Enormous, monolithic corporations in multiple industries across the United States of America have been behaving as though they have come to a single, simple agreement: go to every possible length to prove to the American people how grave a mistake it was to entrust our society's economic, social, cultural, and political landscape to corporations like themselves — indeed, like your own corporation.
Paramount was already one contributor to this trend, refusing to accede to the demands of the Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, and other Hollywood unions for no more reason than because you wish to maximize your profits regardless of the human cost of doing so. You seek not only to profit without properly compensating those who did the real work, but to also make creative work itself obsolete through the weaponization of elaborate algorithms hyped up as "artificial intelligence" in a mockery not only of some of the heroes of the Star Trek franchise, such as Hologram Janeway in Star Trek: Prodigy, but of the intelligence of actual human beings and the very concepts of creativity and sapience.
Other executive misbehaviors in your industry have been moves akin to what you are currently doing to Star Trek: Prodigy right now — the expunging of the final product of months if not years of effort by hundreds of people, all in the name of tax writeoffs. The destruction by Warner Bros. Discovery of all footage related to a Batgirl movie that never premiered was an infamous incident which brought people's attention to the issue; this cultural vandalism, it was explained, was necessary in order to comply with the terms of writing it off as a loss for tax purposes. Just this year, Disney released a Willow series that aired for a mere two weeks before being pulled from their streaming service, again in service of securing a tax writeoff.
You are repeating the same greedy and villainous behavior here: writing off the high-quality work of hundreds of creative workers for no better reason than because it didn't make the line on a graph go up fast enough. While the loss could come out of your own overinflated salaries, bonuses, and stock buybacks, you are instead resorting to legal trickery in order to pretend that nothing of worth was made at all. I further suspect that your greed will additionally drive you to destroy every episode of Star Trek: Prodigy that exists, whether aired or not, because to your eyes an underperforming example of an extraordinarily valuable franchise would be simultaneously too worthless to keep and too valuable to let out of your hands. Certainly, it's the most logical reason why the Batgirl movie's footage would be destroyed, and it would be foolish to assume that you would be above the same reasoning just because Star Trek is the brand you're trying to keep a stranglehold on.
Furthermore, given the current atmosphere of labor disputes, I am not entirely convinced that the decision to cancel and pull Star Trek: Prodigy is not intended in part as a power play. Wealth is more than numbers; it is a dark and corrupt power sufficient to undermine our democratic society and force us to compete rather than collaborate. It would be entirely in character for a moneyed interest such as yourselves to destroy Star Trek: Prodigy in order to make an example of it and attempt to scare creative workers into accepting a diminished mockery of their prior jobs. Go back to work on our terms, you may well be saying, or your previous work gets it.
Of course, it is also possible that your line of thinking is not quite so intentionally malicious. The next most likely option is that to your minds, the decision to cancel Star Trek: Prodigy is a fundamentally meaningless one. It is known that executives of the comic book industry, for example, regard comics as mere decoration that inexplicably allows them to sell paper at a high markup, which otherwise would have no value. There is even an anecdote of a publisher tearing a comic book in half in front of one of the people who collaborated on the issue, only to proclaim with a smirk, "I just lost ten cents." Likewise, I strongly suspect that those such as yourselves resent the fact that you cannot simply stream static and turn a profit thereby.
No matter what the reasoning behind your intention to cancel Star Trek: Prodigy and remove it from the service before its second season has even so much as had a chance to air, it proves that you are terrible, unworthy, and hypocritical stewards of a body of creative work as culturally important as Star Trek. You clearly think nothing of the decades of effort by thousands of people that have gone into the franchise. In the face of late-stage capitalism and misinformation-fueled hatred, Star Trek keeps the dream of a better world alive — a dream that you clearly regard with such contempt that you would endeavor to let it rot away as those with nostalgia for it die, rather than continuing to keep it alive for a new generation who might dare to hope for a better world. Star Trek: Prodigy, like Star Trek as a whole, clearly deserves better than you if you would cancel and delete it. You ought to be ashamed, but I suspect that you are incapable of shame to begin with.
Sincerely,
[real name]
Needless to say, the idea that it was even possible that Star Trek: Prodigy could be thrown into a bonfire as a sacrifice to the god of capitalism enraged me — and it would be far from the first corporate move in the past year to do so. This has been a year of destruction of communities, knowledge, and art, and of full-on assault against the ordinary, non-wealthy people who create and use such things by the billionaires and multimillionaires who use the products of others' hard work as poker chips. We all know about the sabotaging of Twitter, the invasive species that are "intelligent" text and image generation algorithms, and the intended take-backsies of the Reddit API and locking of it behind a ridiculously expensive paywall. For an example that hit closer to home for me, I had already been part of the fight against Wizards of the Coast's attempt to change the Open Gaming License; while that had the pleasantly surprising ending of WotC releasing the entire 5.1 SRD under the CC-BY license (rather than the likely-uncopyrightable excerpts they'd proposed releasing that way a week before that) to create a dual-licensing scheme, WotC then proceeded to blow the second chance they'd earned by sending the Pinkerton Detective Agency out to threaten and intimidate someone who'd received a misdelivered box of Magic cards.
If Square Enix or The LEGO Group goes evil on me too, I swear* that I'll find some way to invent an intercontinental guillotine.
* sarcastically, since the sworn action is not literally possible
In any case, in a year of peak corporate greed and billionaire hubris, I do not trust Paramount to do right by Star Trek: Prodigy by selling it to someone else or putting both full seasons out on Blu-Ray, particularly given how other companies have treated movies and TV shows that were written off for tax purposes. As such, the cancellation/pulling/tax writeoff news prompted me to write a very angry letter to Paramount... only to find that their online email form cut it off halfway through my second paragraph of nine. Thankfully, though, someone helpfully provided an appropriate snail mail address, so I printed my letter out on Sunday and sent it this past Monday. Now that it's been in the system long enough that it should hopefully already be postmarked, I am also going to post it here. That way, my communications will not simply be swallowed into a void of denial on Paramount's end, and the dates should confirm that my letter was not just "copied off the Internet".
To all Paramount board members, executive officers, and shareholders:
I am writing to you today concerning your recent decision to cancel the television show Star Trek: Prodigy and remove it from your Paramount+ service with only a week's warning, despite the pending completion of production of its second season, all in the name of securing a tax writeoff. I presume that you are expecting a child's plea to please keep airing their favorite TV show. Instead, the author of this particular letter is someone who has had the misfortune of being born in this empire in denial called the United States of America forty-five years ago, and has lived here since.
Star Trek is more than just a brand or a franchise — more than just TV shows, movies, and countless other creative works that have made money for decades. It is a vision, however imperfect, of how much better the US, the world, and humankind could be, if we would only leave behind baser impulses such as greed, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism and instead embrace our better natures. The Prime Directive, for example, is an early attempt at anticolonialist thinking; replicators represent the triumph of the common good over the selfish desire to perpetuate scarcity for the enrichment of a few; and Starfleet, despite often being pressed into a military role, is intended first and foremost as a scientific organization akin to NASA. Star Trek: Prodigy represents a better realization of this vision than more adult-oriented, prestige-inspired, "Middle America"-baiting series such as Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. As such, it deserves better marketing, not the chopping block.
Unfortunately, despite this vision inspiring millions, we do not live in a better society than we did in the 1960s. Since the mid-1970s, the wealthy have endeavored to claw back the general prosperity that the US enjoyed when the original Star Trek aired, and attempted to pin the blame for our decline upon the marginalized. These efforts have reached peak malice in the past year. Enormous, monolithic corporations in multiple industries across the United States of America have been behaving as though they have come to a single, simple agreement: go to every possible length to prove to the American people how grave a mistake it was to entrust our society's economic, social, cultural, and political landscape to corporations like themselves — indeed, like your own corporation.
Paramount was already one contributor to this trend, refusing to accede to the demands of the Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, and other Hollywood unions for no more reason than because you wish to maximize your profits regardless of the human cost of doing so. You seek not only to profit without properly compensating those who did the real work, but to also make creative work itself obsolete through the weaponization of elaborate algorithms hyped up as "artificial intelligence" in a mockery not only of some of the heroes of the Star Trek franchise, such as Hologram Janeway in Star Trek: Prodigy, but of the intelligence of actual human beings and the very concepts of creativity and sapience.
Other executive misbehaviors in your industry have been moves akin to what you are currently doing to Star Trek: Prodigy right now — the expunging of the final product of months if not years of effort by hundreds of people, all in the name of tax writeoffs. The destruction by Warner Bros. Discovery of all footage related to a Batgirl movie that never premiered was an infamous incident which brought people's attention to the issue; this cultural vandalism, it was explained, was necessary in order to comply with the terms of writing it off as a loss for tax purposes. Just this year, Disney released a Willow series that aired for a mere two weeks before being pulled from their streaming service, again in service of securing a tax writeoff.
You are repeating the same greedy and villainous behavior here: writing off the high-quality work of hundreds of creative workers for no better reason than because it didn't make the line on a graph go up fast enough. While the loss could come out of your own overinflated salaries, bonuses, and stock buybacks, you are instead resorting to legal trickery in order to pretend that nothing of worth was made at all. I further suspect that your greed will additionally drive you to destroy every episode of Star Trek: Prodigy that exists, whether aired or not, because to your eyes an underperforming example of an extraordinarily valuable franchise would be simultaneously too worthless to keep and too valuable to let out of your hands. Certainly, it's the most logical reason why the Batgirl movie's footage would be destroyed, and it would be foolish to assume that you would be above the same reasoning just because Star Trek is the brand you're trying to keep a stranglehold on.
Furthermore, given the current atmosphere of labor disputes, I am not entirely convinced that the decision to cancel and pull Star Trek: Prodigy is not intended in part as a power play. Wealth is more than numbers; it is a dark and corrupt power sufficient to undermine our democratic society and force us to compete rather than collaborate. It would be entirely in character for a moneyed interest such as yourselves to destroy Star Trek: Prodigy in order to make an example of it and attempt to scare creative workers into accepting a diminished mockery of their prior jobs. Go back to work on our terms, you may well be saying, or your previous work gets it.
Of course, it is also possible that your line of thinking is not quite so intentionally malicious. The next most likely option is that to your minds, the decision to cancel Star Trek: Prodigy is a fundamentally meaningless one. It is known that executives of the comic book industry, for example, regard comics as mere decoration that inexplicably allows them to sell paper at a high markup, which otherwise would have no value. There is even an anecdote of a publisher tearing a comic book in half in front of one of the people who collaborated on the issue, only to proclaim with a smirk, "I just lost ten cents." Likewise, I strongly suspect that those such as yourselves resent the fact that you cannot simply stream static and turn a profit thereby.
No matter what the reasoning behind your intention to cancel Star Trek: Prodigy and remove it from the service before its second season has even so much as had a chance to air, it proves that you are terrible, unworthy, and hypocritical stewards of a body of creative work as culturally important as Star Trek. You clearly think nothing of the decades of effort by thousands of people that have gone into the franchise. In the face of late-stage capitalism and misinformation-fueled hatred, Star Trek keeps the dream of a better world alive — a dream that you clearly regard with such contempt that you would endeavor to let it rot away as those with nostalgia for it die, rather than continuing to keep it alive for a new generation who might dare to hope for a better world. Star Trek: Prodigy, like Star Trek as a whole, clearly deserves better than you if you would cancel and delete it. You ought to be ashamed, but I suspect that you are incapable of shame to begin with.
Sincerely,
[real name]
no subject
Date: 2023-06-29 02:49 am (UTC)I mean... the least it could have done is cut it off at paragraph seven of nine.