[NitpickLawyer]

> you couldn't ask for a more "hacker-brained" take on culture. what, sitting around on our computers building dinky little apps does more than movies, film and music?

Uhhh, yes? Can you imagine a global pandemic of 2020s magnitude happening in, say '94? Would the world at large have fared as well as we did without the "dinky little apps" like click-to-get-food and click-to-stock-warehouses and click-to-develop-rna-vaccines and click-to-work-remotely and click-to-talk-to-family and click-to-watch-anything and click-to-stay-sane? Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...

[leocgcd]

>Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...

Yes? Art has been made for at least 17,000 years, it is a fundamental expression of human consciousness. This is like asking if symbolic thinking or language is more important than IT. Yes. Obviously. The sum of all IT work is a blip compared to the sum total of human expression across our species's existence.

You're right, if IT hadn't been present during the last pandemic, we would have been much worse off. But even if we had apocalyptic human collapse and reverted to a pre-historic hunter-gatherer existence with primitive technologies... people would still be making art.

[NitpickLawyer]

You are not arguing what you quoted, then. You list things that I agree with - art is important, and it's intertwined with our development. It is, like our LLM buddies would say, crucial on the tapestry of history delving. Or something.

But that is not an argument for art doing more for the world, right now, than the IT industry. In fact, it is the latter that takes art and makes it accessible on a scale that was impossible decades ago. Accessible to the masses, understandable to anyone, and so on. Literature is art. And we now have every piece of human literature at our fingertips. And not just us, I mean almost any human being, including the poorest of the poor. You should look at the impact technology is having in the less fortunate parts of the world - from health care, to supplies delivery, clean water, education, access to information, and so on.

It's one thing to consider art important. It's another to put it ahead in "world impact" than technology.

[sandworm101]

Virtually every invention in tech was first inspired by art. Does anyone seriously believe that the people who brought us cellphones were not first hardcore Trekkers?