Post-scarcity entertainment
What to do when nothing really matters?
There is now infinite stuff. It was always the case that a human lifetime is not long enough to be able to experience all that humans have created: go back a couple hundred years and there were already too many books to read, too many paintings to see. The 20th century added radio, magazines, photographs, TV, film, comics, video games. The 21st century has already contributed blogs, vlogs (does anyone still use that term?), self-publishing, tiktoks. Whatever comes next.
720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.1
An average of 29 new games were released every day on Steam in 2021.2
It’s hard to get a definitive number of books released each year, but most sources seem to estimate it being several million.
So, yes. There’s infinite stuff. And when there’s an infinite amount of content, does any of it have any actual worth? In a post-scarcity entertainment landscape, how does enthusiasm even work? Fandom? Longevity?
