this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
198 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2352 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is capitalism good for scientific progress?
The opposite, in fact.
Modern movies, tv, music, and gaming prove pretty decisively that putting hyper-greedy capitalist shareholder proxies in charge of said industries turns their creativity to shit. It also turns healthcare, education, and more core societal functions to shit, but that's another story.
Why take a risk on a bold, original, visionary script that might succeed or fail spectacularly, a risk your industry exists to take, when you can make another derivative established IP sequel with a mass appeal formula applied to the story resulting in a highly predictable revenue stream?
Capitalism eats itself in the quest for infinite growth in a finite system. When it runs out of room to grow, it starts eating itself and calling it maximizing efficiency.
*edit sorry I replied to the person's top question instead of their followup of whether capitalism increases creativity, still applies though.
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.