The cost of feeding the entertainment machine

Another vision is that there's a hybrid model, where companies embrace the fact that human-generated content a) has less scarcity value in a world where things that look like the output of hours of work from talented people can be produced in seconds[4], but b) is valuable as a unique input into such content creation. That's the direction The Diff ... See more

Our feeds are designed to “prod the would-be attender ever onward from one monetizable object to the next,” he writes. This has had a deadening effect on all kinds of culture, from Marvel blockbusters that optimize for attention minute to minute, to automated Spotify recommendations that push one similar song after another.