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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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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.