2 notes

Many large firms have discarded the traditional notions of partnership — loyalty, collegiality, a sense of equality — and instead transformed themselves into bottom-line, profit-maximizing businesses. These trends, they say, have destroyed the fabric of a law firm partnership, where a shared sense of purpose once created willingness to weather difficult times. “Because the partnership lacks any shared cultural values or history, money becomes the core value holding the firm together,” said William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University who studies law firms. “Money is weak glue.

23 notes

I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. I still do but I’m less sure of it than I once was. I come here because I want to start a dialogue. I feel that what we artists were promised has not really panned out. Yes in many ways we have more freedom. Artistically this is certainly true. But the music business never transformed into the vibrant marketplace where small stakeholders could compete with multinational conglomerates on an even playing field. In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.

9 notes

I think one of the things that surprised me was there’s an artifice—that’s not the right word—there’s a construct, and when you step out of it, it reveals how false exactly that construct is. There is a great sense that what you do matters enormously when you’re working in comics. Yes, they matter to some people, but in the grand scheme of things? On a smaller level, when you’re inside the apparatus, and you are feeding the apparatus and you are part of the mechanism, you will be rewarded and welcomed for it, you know, you’re proving your worth, and your self-worth, in a way—and the second you are not, nobody has the time for you. At all. And I think that was one of the things that really took me by surprise when I left was, wow, all these people who said they were friends, claimed to be friends, they absolutely weren’t. I mean, I dropped off their radar entirely. I was naive enough to believe they had been my friends, and that did not help. That was a dark place for a really, really long time.