Being Fed Content

From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow:

Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.

I feel like Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece on robotaxis, People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions, rhymes with Hertzfeldt’s comments:

For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases — such as the invention of ride-sharing apps — Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before.

• Don Hertzfeldt
• interviews
• Xochitl Gonzalez