i like to imagine how people in the post-material-scarcity future would romanticise the current time period.
having a job gave people a sense of community and purpose lacking in our modern age where nobody is forcing you to get out of bed on threat of starvation. actually the average office worker in the early 21st century was so much wealthier than a UBI-having-modern if you forget to count paying rent and also make some very bad purchasing power conversions. if you look at contemporary records (sitcom where the main characters are only at work when it's plot relevant) it is obvious that employment was never really a major obstacle to having an active social life or pursuing your own passions.
Honestly I have a lot of...concerns about how a post scarcity society would work in relation to the things that I love. But I hope having to give up things like tv and pop culture and toys makes them happier
why would a post-scarcity society have to give up those things? what do you think post-scarcity means?
I mean, cartoons are probably going to end up "reduced" to Glitch Productions type things, like 10 minutes of animation every 6 months. There's just no way to produce 20 minutes of quality animation on a weekly or even a monthly basis in a world where no one has an incentive to work on an idea that isn't theirs.
Why would anyone choose to do inbetweens on someone else's cartoon, when they have no financial or occupational obstacles to just working on their OWN cartoon? Animation takes dozens or hundreds of people to do to current quality and a lot of it is a really shit job to get stuck with.
The same goes for things like toys and collectables. Who is going to CHOOSE to make someone else's dolls all day when anyone with the skill or the talent is 100% fo the kind of person who would just be making their OWN dolls in miniscule batches.
Remove employment from the equation and I just don't see any reason why ANYONE would do large entertainment projects at current scale. And even if they did, most of them would crumble under the fact that the entire workforce can and will just leave at any possible moment, right?
This isn't a dig, or a gotcha, it's just the thought I constantly have when this concept comes up
i think you're imagining 'nobody needs a job to survive' but 'post scarcity' is a stronger postulate than that, and implies something like e.g. if i have an idea for a doll or a tv show it can trivially be mass produced (generally under the assumption that we can automate almost all things that nowadays require human labour)
We're uhh...kind of already starting to try and do that automation step.
and the results are not great.
we've been doing the automation thing for centuries and I would describe the results as nothing short of amazing.
The idea that people would always rather “work on their own cartoon” is a bit flawed. There are people who love animation, but not story-boarding. There are people who love to draw, but not to script a graphic novel. There are people who happily illustrate, but don’t want to write a novel. There are people who love to write, but do not enjoy acting. There are actors who love to portray a character, but do not enjoy coming up with the character in the first place.
There are people who love the mundane tasks. People who enjoy adding text to graphic novels, who love to do inbetweens for animation, who enjoy handling foley for movies.
The idea that no one will ever wish to work in collaboration with others is kinda wild. People work in collaboration on open source projects All The Time without any sort of monetary compensation. Much of the time people would RATHER work in collaboration than just do it all themselves because humans love community.
