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.
WhatsApp and Signal come to mind
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
See also the flowchart next to this one, where artists want to make something as a passion project, but there is no market for it and they have rent to pay, so they have to go with the safe, soulless option instead, slowly dying inside as their dreams are crushed.
Bring back the patronage system. That court musician life sounded pretty sweet.
Patreon is like that, except that instead of a single patron, you get dozens or hundreds and they all expect to monopolise your time each month for $3 each.
