Indie films still get made, big actors work at scale, or certain content shifts to new platforms (e.g. streaming). The decline of independence in Hollywood has little to do with unions and more to do with unregulated, entertainment industry monopolies.
Who do you think enforces those monopolies? Working outside SAG can have deleterious effects on your access to future roles. Disobeying Disney as a movie theater can sink your access to their future releases. Both the institution and the union work together to make the monopoly. They are two sides of the same coin.
Psy, gangnam style becoming a billion-view hit doesn't happen in a heavily controlled music industry. YouTube made that happen. Unions are bad news and they are meant to be. The decade of good is over.
Again, this is a failure of imagination, believing that unions are inevitably shaped like the unions of the past. As tech is founded on disruption and innovation, it is defeatism to assume that worker relationships have to be a certain way- especially when there are models of unions and management having a less antagonistic relationship, as in Germany.
