Shortly after midnight on December 8, 1962, on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, right at the epicenter of the world, hundreds of people who worked in the newspaper industry walked out of the New York Times building and into the cold streets to begin a strike that would last 114 days. About 17,000 newspaper employees, from pressmen to paper handlers, elevators operators to reporters, joined the picket lines. “At its core, the New York newspaper strike was a battle over technology,” Scott Sherman wrote in Vanity Fair. “The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of computerized typesetting systems that would revolutionize the newspaper composing room. Newspapers that prohibited unions, such as the Los Angeles Times, rushed to install cutting-edge computers such as the RCA 301. Newspapers with union contracts, including those in New York City, faced tempestuous resistance from labor leaders, who could easily see that automation would cost jobs.”

Of course, the newspaper strike didn’t stop the future. If anything, it simply hastened the demise of numerous newspapers. What the union leaders at the time didn’t understand (or want to accept) was that technology cannot be stopped, slowed, or avoided in an industry that is being disrupted. Either you find a way to adapt, or someone else does. Years after that strike, the veteran reporter Tom Wolfe, who had been a journalist at the Herald Tribune at the time, would say, “This was an absolutely foolish strike. There was a stubborn union leadership that was not going to give in, no matter what.”

Hollywood, which has mostly avoided the dislocations affecting the rest of the media industry, now faces its own moment of reckoning. Unlike journalism, where technology has decimated profit margins, Tinseltown is still living high on the hog, sustaining an entire ecosystem of agents and middlemen who do nothing, add little value, and get paid incredibly well for their services. That’s why trying to get a movie or TV show made in Hollywood is like watching a salmon swim upstream with a cinderblock hooked onto its dorsal fin. And it’s also why the current brouhaha between the unions and agents puts so much at stake in the industry.

If you don’t live in one of the most expensive ZIP codes in America, here’s a little recap of what’s going on. Last week, the Writers Guild of America required its members to fire agents who would not agree to a new code of conduct regarding the widespread use of packaging fees, wherein agents get paid by studios or networks, rather than taking a standard 10 percent commission tied to writers’ earnings, and thus are able to make more money than the writers themselves. On Wednesday, the union ramped up its battle with the major talent agencies, announcing a lawsuit against the four agencies that dominate Hollywood: WME, CAA, UTA, and ICM. (My colleague Joy Press has a great rundown here.) With numerous writers going without agents, the W.G.A. has created a new online submission system designed to replace some of their functions.

The online tool is an imperfect fix, but one wonders if the W.G.A. spat is just the beginning of Silicon Valley hollowing out Hollywood in the same way that it has nearly every other creative industry in America. Right now, Hollywood is booming. There are now almost 500 original scripted TV series being produced a year, an astounding increase of over 100 from six years ago. But as a longtime technology journalist who has watched technology decimate journalism (or at least journalism’s profit margins), it’s not hard to see why Hollywood is next—and why the unions in Hollywood are in for a fight like no other. Part of the problem is that some of the big agencies, like CAA, want to go public in the not-too-distant future, and need to keep their revenue up in order to do so successfully. Packaging fees account for a big part of that equation. In addition, the consolidation of power by new streaming-video juggernauts, such as Disney+, WarnerMedia, Netflix, and Amazon, will mean the ability to make money on the backend from international sales (which happens when a show is hugely successful, like ER or CSI) is all but about to vanish.