That’s a lovely essay, I just read through it and it’s given me a lot to think about. Dreaming is something that has influenced my thinking quite a bit having spent a bit too much time in my own head growing up.
The distincition between entertainment and art here is particularly salient, although I would imagine the pressure on both would still be present. For entertainment it would be pure engagement farming, how much attention can be captured. Meanwhile art would be about the commodization of expanding the mind, pithy insights made for people to easily consume and “expand” their mind in a safe manner with minimal effort. Vacuous for an entirely different reason than entertainment, and I’d say perhaps more dangerous as a result.
”The only cure for bad fiction is good fiction”; but I might say that entertainment is neutral fiction, bad fiction can lead people’s minds down terrible paths.
Jack
Karma: 35
I’m unsure what your point here is, my goal is to gesture at how we have relatively recently saturated food production and are now making hyperpalatable food.
That in mind, there is still a lot to be said about the difference between hunting and gathering food and agriculture. I just didn’t feel like it was in scope of this essay, did anything leap out to you as being particularly salient?
Honestly, I lament the fact that things like soylent are not supposed to be eaten frequently. There should be some sort of balance though, as you run the risk of being instantly and permanently compromised by the first dorito you eat (as I’ve seen happen to children of crunchy people).
Now that’s a thought, I would say that there are a good number of “health food” stores that try and fall into that category, updating their branding to be all browns and greens to really give that natural feeling. But as you have correctly pointed at, they are generally compromised by economic concerns. Part of the problem is that people are bad at going to a place like that and only buying the healthy stuff because we are generally already compromised...
The arms race between grocery stores/deliveroo/doordash/etc. and people trying to eat healthy would be funny just in that it would mirror current attempts to avoid the media equivalent (ads). The buying experience has grown increasingly unfriendly to consumers, despite the promise of targeted ads, so I would be surprised if there isn’t a significant market for something as simple as “DoorDash, but we only show things within a defined nutritional profile”.
I’d say the closest equivlent are meal planning companies that ship out fully made meals every day for quite a fee, but they can be carefully tuned for health and ensuring the brain isn’t wrecked by temptations.