As a writer myself I should probably be following the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike a little more closely. Whatever you may think of unions, the strike is at least an attempt to address some fundamental issues about how writers will get paid in our rapidly changing media environment.

That said, it’s hard to get too worked up over the plight of people who work in sunny L.A. and don’t feel they got fairly compensated for writing episodes of Law & Order: Stenographers — or whatever the latest spinoff is called. Cosmic injustice this ain’t.

What little I have read about it has come National Review contributor and Hollywood screenwriter Rob Long’s blog. Long thinks the people running his union are clueless and have no understanding of how technology is changing the business.

My Silicon Valley friends all shake their heads in amazement that the [Hollywood] system has gone on so long. They pay you what? I hear them ask. And your success rate is what?

He expects the whole strike will result in a complete rout for the writers union.

[It is] really kind of like the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, around 1911, still riding around on horses, in bright red battle dress, about to face a cheaper, leaner, world — [and] about to get trampled on.

That’s what he thinks anyway. As Long puts it:

I’m semi-apocalyptic about everything. That which does not kill me, I’ve always believed, only takes longer to kill me.