TV, movies, music, video games, the internet, what’s next to carve out and ruin?
On extremely rare occasions the right people exist in a company where they’re funded to do it for profit and somehow manage to turn it into an untainted passion project.
This creates things that stand out as absurdly over-delivering compared to everything else in their field. And nothing comes close to them again until by some accident another team manages to create a passion project with full funding.
One thing I like pointing out to gamer types who believe there would be no innovation without capitalism is that many of the most successful games on the market are derived from free mods.
The most popular game ever was made as a side project by a Soviet scientist
Comrade Mojang really turned his life around after the Soviet Union collapsed
My one “the kids are wrong” take is when I was a kid, selling out was bad, but now it seems that it’s celebrated.
The fans are happy that their favourite creators are getting the bag in a world where that’s impossible with just an average salary, I think it’s sweet. I do this too though I don’t really have any creators I like
No doubt getting the bag is nice, but when millennials were kids the selling out part was considered bad not because getting the bag is bad in itself but because getting the bag usually means changing the nature of the art to make it more marketable. It means answering to the rich guys handing you the bag. I just miss that acknowledgement, that the art would be inevitably watered down by appeal to larger markets.
Fuck. Ain’t that the truth.
Steve Wozniak and the iPhone and Mac Computers
I would say Steve Woz is probably the one millionaire who isn’t a complete dipshit and who I’ll defend sometimes. His primary goal was to just make computers and share it with people, he got cheated and lied to by Jobs who he thought was a friend, he begrudgingly let Jobs turn his products into a business venture, and he became wealthy.
Now that’s he’s rich, he just fucks around and goes on interviews sometimes. He doesn’t do motivational speeches or pretends to be some tech guru like Musk. And I’m sure he showers. I don’t think he’s been in the loop with new tech, but he still seems genuinely interested in it from the technical side which is rare for knowledgeable people who become rich and alienated from their field
