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by Fluorescence
626 days ago
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Cheaper more effective entertainment is likely to only cause more problems: it will be more addictive, better at hijacking our brains and attention, better at pushing the propaganda goals of the author, better at filling traditional "human needs" of relationships that forever separates us from each other into a civilisation of Hikikomori. I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits. On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices. I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though. |
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Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea, because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can come up on your own.