Youtubers are already showing (and Camgirls showed long before) that you can, to a large extent, sell friendship. It can be a mass market product, or it can be

Youtubers are already showing (and Camgirls showed long before) that you can, to a large extent, sell friendship. It can be a mass market product, or it can be something fairly niche. A history professor with a hobby for Collectible Card games made a successful transition into a youtube webseries host[1][2]. I give some money each month to eSports personalities like Day[9], TotalBiscuit, Neuro; each of whom address their viewers as friends (with cute nicknames). Twitch is a media empire built entirely around this interaction, but Youtube's success with PewDiePie and Markiplier is essentially the same thing. People are willing to pay to watch friends being friends - Most of RoosterTeeth's entertainment product is basically just that. But we've also seen niche markets be more effectively catered to. I'm running up a decent bill on Patreon each month, less than I would for a cable subscription, and I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the interactions I am having, even if they're somewhat passive. I see the future of work looking a lot like migrant laborers sending remittances does now, but with a very different scale and breadth. A lot of mid-sized communities (small towns), where there's a single major breadwinner and a bunch of entertainment and services to support them, but without the vassalage that this lead to in the past because of the interconnectedness of the social graph and the amount of flexibility that allows. The new social structures are going to look somewhat between an extended family and an orgy. The social ties are moving from fixed points like blood and religion into common interests and value sets... which are well predicted by the old indicators, but not exclusively tied to. I just hope that we survive it, because the re-org will not be pretty. Tribalism and fear of the unknown are still powerful factors, even if the widening of personality-space has weakened them. [1]https://np.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/35pjuq/tolarian_community_college_talks_about_youtube/cr6r7sg https://np.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/35pjuq/tolarian_co... [2]https://www.patreon.com/tolariancommunitycollege https://www.patreon.com/tolariancommunitycollege