Soylent E(ntertainment)

In ancient times, when we were all in tribes, if someone was bothering to entertain you (gossip with you/tell you a story, sing to you, cook food beyond mere practical necessity for you), it was something valuable in survival terms (and thus, valuable in general) because you were essentially interlinked with them - that they entertained you meant they were looking out for you (maybe one would say they entertained you so as to curry your favour, so you'd look out for them. But whatever - some amount of mutual looking out would occur, centered around entertainment)

But it's pretty clear the people who entertain you now...are nowhere near you. Maybe, at best, you go to a music concert and see them way, way over on the stage over there (with a line of burly, violent looking bouncers between you and them) and they shout 'How ya doing?'. And maybe you scream out. But they don't know, even though they act like they do.

Your TV - your movies, egregiously so given hollywoods distance from you.

But they thing is, they put the human in the entertainment. That's how they unlock the money from you - they need the human in it, not because the human somehow is the important thing itself (as it loves to sing as if it is). It's because the system still needs to make objects that have human in them, to get resources from humans. They need to feed you the human in order to get your money.

And you buy into it, because of your ancient instinct that entertainment is good. And it was good, back when the singer/storyteller was across the campfire from you and was watching for what might come up behind you.

Or else why gravitate towards working hours of your life and even the unrewarded pursuit of labour (for which to be lowly rewarded) to give over the proceeds of that for some sound waves and some flashing colours?

If someone was watching out for you when they did that, that'd make sense.

I say this as a potential writer myself, with around the 50k+ words needed, or more if I patched together my nanowremo effort (man, that was a bizzare month!). What would I be selling you anyway?

What would I be being, trying to sell - I can see the system using human to extract from human. I can't pretend I'm just naively writing books and hoping gosh darn the good people just lurve the books. I can see the money. I can see the exploitation, wraught from being entirely wrenched from the ecosystem that made entertainment have value to begin with.

So what up from here?

Meanwhile I haunt bitcoin faucets...