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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Some of the really bad consequences of media addiction are currently limited by the low quality of most ‘bulk’ visual content (reels, daytime TV, YouTube, most video games).

When you get to a stage where you can cheaply generate infinite seasons of Mad Men or Sopranos or Red Dead Redemption quality entertainment, such that you can play a 5000 hour Rockstar campaign or watch 10,000 episodes of your favorite comfy comedy show with no discernible dip in quality, it’s over.

Wall E remains, the failure to predict Ozempic excluded, the most deeply prescient piece of 21st century mainstream science fiction media.

While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.

Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.

Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.

I disagree, I think you’ve got the relationship backwards. People who are already addicted to media demand the meaningless bulk content. They reel at more substantial works. Substantial works would require them to invest themselves in a more enriching way in what they consume. Offering them infinite high quality works wouldn’t get them to actually partake in said works, and this is shown by the fact that currently most people give little attention to those that are already on offer. For them to partake in quality works would presuppose them not being addicted to consumer slop.

I mean, in such a scenario, we'll get Wall E if we're lucky.

If not, we'll end up with Blindsight. Which, funny enough, predates Wall E by two years.

I'd rather not have either of them, personally.

What's over? Do you genuinely believe that there will be meaningful cognitive or physical work for baseline humans to do beyond the near future? If we're economically unproductive, we have to pass the time somehow. It's like complaining that the music of the angelic choir in heaven is too good and you don't feel like playing tennis.

Those who want more ever more sophisticated forms of entertainment will probably get them, I'm not enough of a snob to think that someone watching the equivalent of the best prestige TV or better ad their primary hobby is doing something wrong.

I don’t know, I think company and companionship with other biological humans are important. Call me sentimental but if everyone’s going to be living out hyperrealistic fantasies in VR for dopamine for 80 years then I struggle to see why you mightn’t just save the resources and administer them a euphoric fatal heroin dose and be done with it.

I am increasingly absolutely convinced that a fulfilling post-scarcity world will involve mandatory make-work, not 40 hours a week of fake emailing (ideally), but forced interaction with other human beings, teamwork, shared projects, civic engagement, some kind of social credit to encourage basic politeness and decency even if you don’t need them to survive and so on.

I grew up with many people who already live ‘post scarcity’ lives on account of great inherited wealth and the ones who consume all day are universally less happy than the ones who work, even in high pressure jobs, even though they will inherit more than they could make in a thousand years.

Wall-E is about the choice that post-scarcity offers. At the end, when the humans are replanting trees and clearing garbage it’s clear that AI and robotics are good enough in this universe to do this work, but it’s the humans who win when they do it themselves.

We're not here because we're free; we're here because we're not free. There's no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We're here to take from you what you tried to take from us. Purpose.

It'll be over because pure consumers of value who produce nothing and aren't even related to the producers of value will cease to be around sooner or later. Sooner or later some paperclipper will optimize us away, and there'll be no good reason not to do it.

I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't. Regardless of how good something is I want to cycle between different sorts of stimuli and types of activities, some providing "fun" and others "meaning".

This seems to be a lot like gambling and many addictions to me. The vast majority have no issues to engage in moderate use while a small minority can't control themselves and self destruct, and young people are more vulnerable.

I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't.

The fanfic industry gives the lie to this. Many of us do indeed want endless streams the same media with a few changes and wrinkles thrown in. Most of these fics are very derivative even for an inherently derivative art form even where it doesn't make sense - see Stations of Canon - and many are just bad yet we slog through them hoping to find the few that let us recapture the same feeling we got consuming the original work.

The popularity of thousand-chapter webfics indicates otherwise. If the AI learns to generate cultivation LitRPG isekai with ten thousand chapters (and tailor it to the reader's taste), a lot of people will never touch anything else.

I don't know about thousand chapter webfics, but I've been reading Hajime no Ippo for nigh on 20 years, and it's over 1000 chapters. It's a particular relationship between reader and author, a long running manga like this. You get someone's idiosyncratic direct creative output, without the design by committee aspects of a lot of other media. You watch them grow and develop, not just in their craftsmanship, but in their perspective, which often comes through in how the story evolves. As you age with them, they continue telling a story that hits right at your mutually changing maturity level.

Hajime no Ippo and Berserk are more or less the only manga I still read anymore. Everything else either finished, or I lost interest. Now the question is if I live long enough to see anything resembling an ending to either.

That's not quite what I'm getting at. I don't really care if someone wants to read a an endless webserial or not, I don't see how that matters. What I tried to respond to was the media addiction part, with the implication that sufficient amount of quality media of ones preferred sort, like endless office episodes for those who are into that or an endless webserial, would lead people to only engaging in that, essentially amounting to a low tech wireheading.

My point is that even if we got endless episodes/chapters/whatever, most people would still want to do a variety of things outside of media consumption.

Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.

One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week

Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.

That's just called "life".

Kind of. Compare "life" to a game though...

  • You only get one chance to play, with permadeath. That means you have to be really, really careful and avoid taking risks.
  • No fast travel. It takes forever just to get anywhere
  • There's only one server and way too many players, so all the best stuff has massive queues
  • It's been running a long time, so a lot of stuff is dominated by powergames and guilds who started long before you were ever born
  • Completely OP, some stuff is just way better than other stuff, and if you choose wrong you're screwed
  • Tons of trolling and toxic players who never get banned
  • Most of us never get to fight or rule anything. We're just stuck grinding at a boring job
  • Tons of random luck

I don't know, someone needs to revamp this "life"

How about "Life 2.0"? With adventure, romance, high-speed chases, daredevil stunts, whatever you want.

You can have all that already!

Can you?

Can the 55 year old accountant with a bum leg and asthma really be James Bond if he just REALLY tries?

Can he really be Genghis Khan? Would it be wise or even good if he could?

A high-speed car chase in VR is fun and thrilling. In real life, it's tragic and destructive.

But no, people can't have everything they want in life. A big part of growing up for most people, who are ordinary, is coming to terms with and accepting that you are, in fact, not special - and that's ok. You'll never be famous, you'll never make a great scientific discovery, you'll never make a speech that shakes the world, you'll never have 1 second let alone 15 minutes of fame. Hell, for most, you'll never even be an ordinary rich guy. Sure, people shouldn't be complacent and should work to get what they can, but don't pretend that there aren't limits especially for the 50% of the population below the median. Because that's the brutal truth: there is always a bottom half.

Why shouldn't they be allowed some escapism?

"That's just virtuality, imitation of life. Can AI VR let you truly enjoy adventure? Find romance and fame?"

"Can you?"

Not the romance, and if you try the rest it usually ends in short order with death, hospitalization, or jail.

Banned for targeted personal attacks (on me).

I wish there was more actually good Xianxia, 3k chapters just isn't enough.

I'm writing one, don't worry. Hopefully it's good. ;D

Send me a link!

Sure, here you go. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/133044/seed-of-the-radiant-grove

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