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Would it also be a good thing if we also limited the numbers of authors, poets and musicians in the world to the number "strictly necessary"? Why or why not?
by zxcmx 6y ago
Would it also be a good thing if we also limited the numbers of authors, poets and musicians in the world to the number "strictly necessary"?
Why or why not?
My take on it is that in the absence of omnipotent global co-ordination / allocation of resources that the "surplus" people are basically doing discovery. They are discovering the actual market size, exploring adjacent markets and all sorts of things about executing dog walking apps and apps in general etc.
I don't know if these are "bullshit jobs" or not, I'm not even sure if dog walking apps are necessary at all, but I'm not sure how we all figure that out without a discovery process.
I did enjoy the article, it made me think.
- fsociety 6y agoI had a slightly different read on the article’s conclusion - mostly because it doesn’t prescribe a solution to the issue. If you have 100K people building a service for dog walkers, and we only need 100 people to build that service.. you can end up at an interesting conclusion. If we had the means to provide people with a basic means of living, say shelter/food/water/safety-nets, then would 100K people be building that service for dog walkers? I think the answer is no. They’d be doing vastly different things with their time on this Earth. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I believe the article doesn’t prescribe a solution because there are many directions you could head from this observation.
- zxcmx 6y agoOn reflection, I agree with you. Making art is at least a largely voluntary activity, even if most songs will never be heard and most books will never be read. From this point of view the root cause of the problem is that some people have a lot more access to money than others and can compel others to be human props in their dream of founding and leading a dog-walking-app startup.
- user00012-ab 6y agoIf it got rid of all the content farm creators and just left people that really wanted to create, then yes.