DERIVATIVE MEDIA: HOW WALLSTREET DEVOURS CULTURE

A talk by Andrew deWaard, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

Talk Description: Media systems are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. 

Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (UC Press, 2024) shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming our media texts into marketplaces of branded transactions. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.