Does the SOPA blackout on the Web today (by Wikipedia, Reddit, and even Google’s blacking out of its own trademark on its home page for the day) have a lesson for the job market?
I think so. As conceived (I’ve covered this at length on the main blog), SOPA would cost more jobs in lost startups and established service companies than it would save in media companies. For a variety of reasons, it actually would be very ineffective in preventing piracy and saving Hollywood and music industry jobs in legacy companies, although allowing legacy companies more of an oligopoly on what can be produced and distributed at all might protect some guild members.
It’s well known that it could burden service companies with having to police “user generated content”, not just for direct copyright violation but perhaps for linking to or inadvertently supporting “rogue” foreign companies beyond the reach of usual US (and Interpol) law enforcement. It would be a kind of conscription against a "foreign enemy" (to legacy companies).
Yes, SOPA could put “amateurism” in jeopardy, but that’s a bit ironic as the effect of social networking sites, forcing people to lead “unified lives” on the web to remain employed, may be having the same effect.
As for the Occupy movement and the support from Anonymous (which have vigorously opposed SOPA), I wonder one thing: Someone with the skills to useful to “Assange” has the skills to get any job he or she wants in the Internet security industry. There’s no reason to live in tents in city parks, or to wind up in jail. I wish I had the skills and quickness of a “Lisbeth” (“Dragon Tattoo”), a Nolan (“Revenge”), or even V. (Yup, Nolan is even "cute".)
By the way, I've actually looked at Hollywood employment before. After the 2001 layoff, I actually looked at the jobs on the Warner Brothers website in early 2002. At the time, there was a lot of DB2, but they seemed to want mainframe and C++ in the same person. The jobs actually looked pretty good. I didn't contact them, though, when I went to California in February 2002 for 10 days.
Actually, their IT job listing (for Time Warner) now is pretty interesting. It's here. I wonder what they mean by "workbrain".
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