Comment by api
2 hours ago
I didn’t mean to come off as criticizing you, just providing a balancing counterpoint on some of the ideas.
The question is: can you give billions of people the “authentic” version?
In some cases you can. In the US at least there’s boutique groceries and farmers markets that sell more authentic organic food that usually does have better nutritional value. But it costs more.
The artificial mass market imitation is cheaper because it is thermodynamically cheaper. It takes far less labor (the most costly input to almost all processes) and it substitutes things that can be bulk produced at a lower unit cost. Being less nutritious probably directly correlates since nutrition is chemical complexity is lower entropy, higher energy, harder to scale.
There’s a lot of rare “authentic” experiences that cannot be scaled. That means most people can’t have them, ever.
You can’t have both rarity / exclusivity and democratization / equality. One side has to give.
This is exactly what the article touches on, the race to the bottom. It drags everyone's experience down. This appeal to scalability is part of the problem, IMO. Not every experience is or should be scalable. Some kids find blackberry bushes at grandma's instead of strawberries. Little is gained by strip mining human experience so the thinnest veneer can be "scaled".
But what do you do about free will? If billions of people want maple syrup, do you say “no, no, we can’t scale the real thing and corn syrup is a poor substitute, so you can’t have even a simulacrum of the experience”?
That means most people can never have it, which is why romanticism ends up pining for aristocracy.
I take your point, but the other argument against scaling in this way doesn't rely on sentiment: it's unsustainable. I actually hate that word, but the point is that current production methods create (unpriced) environmental externalities. We're draining aquifers, exhausting topsoil, pouring fertilizer into rivers, using too much petroleum - and then throwing a massive portion of what we produce away. (And that's just for food; similar arguments exist for fashion, and sometimes for buildings and infrastructure.) That argument gets effectively zero traction - despite, I think, being the better one - so some people who care more about that argue from sentiment instead, which (for the reasons you explain, and rightly object to) has better legs with the general public.