Comment on And now Bezos is trying to inserts ads everywhere
Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world 9 months agoI don’t know if that’s quite the right way to frame the complaints. I don’t think that having things to entertain you for free is necessarily a human right (even if paywalling all media is a bleak alternative), but I do think people have a right to be charged a reasonable amount for entertainment. There was a long time where you paid 8$ a month and got access to just about every single movie and tv show that had ever been made in the US.
It was wildly profitable for Netflix, who in turn paid licensing fees to all the owners of their content, and customers were happy, it was great. Then all the cable companies started their own streaming services, licensed media was reclaimed as the garden walls went up, and suddenly comprehensive access to media ballooned from 10$ a month to hundreds . The services themselves got worse, ads started getting inserted into paid accounts, and subscription prices steadily rose across the board.
I don’t think people are declaring that media should be free, but after Netflix almost killed piracy because most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for reasonable access, a lot of people are understandably unhappy with the streaming industry going from an affordable revolution to cable 2.0 in a single decade.
who8mydamnoreos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Is consuming endless entertainment “participation is society”? No, its a distraction from society.
Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“People shouldn’t consume media” is a hot new take I didn’t expect. A call to return to sitting on the porch and aimlessly staring at the neighborhood for hours while sipping on sweet tea and smoking a pipe.
who8mydamnoreos@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There is a plethora of activities besides watching TV. Have we been so spoiled by endless entertainment that we forgot that? Our local communities are nonexistent, maybe sitting on your porch you could meet some neighbors, have a real conversation; build back what was lost.
Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There are, but they’re all entertainment media. Books, television, games, every avenue of entertainment is being steadily hypercapitalized and compartmentalized. Communities aren’t failing because people have entertainment, they’ve fallen apart because the outside world has almost no places left where people can freely gather. You don’t meet your neighbors because there aren’t any sidewalks, because the parks need to be driven to, because downtown has strip malls instead of boardwalks where people can gather.
I grew up hanging out in the Walmart parking lot because that’s the only place we wouldn’t be shooed away. Entertainment is what fills the absence of community, not the cause of it.