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Media seems like one of the domains where capitalism and the profit motive works the least, the other being a lot of health care.

In media it seems to be an immediate race to the bottom that converges on dopamine generating chum and slop. A bottomless TikTok-style infinite scroll feed of mindless shit is the ideal form of profitable media.

Good art, in depth investigative reporting done in a disciplined fact based way, those kinds of things are expensive and time consuming to make and don’t tend to sell broadly. It’s not because people don’t want them. It’s because people don’t like paying for something intangible. People will spend $25 in Starbucks for a coffee and a snack but dissolve into rage at paying that for an album, book, or movie, even though those deliver a lot more and cost a lot more to make.