As I hit “publish”, I hear Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s voice in my head, saying “You understand, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.”
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World builders can diverge from reality quite a bit, and for fantastical stories, this is compulsory, whether something as restrained as Hav by Jan Morris or as outre and surreal as the work of Leonora Carrington. However, not all divergences from reality are created equal, and they should all be to roughly the same degree in the same work — most importantly, the writer should understand what the big asks from their work is and implies.
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The problem, though, is that these tools will remain cheap, and will continue to be so even deep into their derangement. The people generating cognitive poison for children up above spend almost no money and almost as little time on their work. They can repeat this process hundreds of times in the space it takes a legitimate children’s book to be made. It produces garbage, but the margins are incredibly friendly. Why do six months of work that involves thought and skilled labor if you can just spend the same period of time churning out digital slop for the same payout?
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Somehow, though, famously bad – or just forgettable – movies like Super Mario Brothers, Waterworld, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, Event Horizon, Starship Troppers, and Demolition Man are getting treated as hidden gems. Some of these I see the point with, others I don’t. Hell, I’ve done similar things in my own life with such films as Mystery Men. Is this simple nostalgia, or is it something else?
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Because of the Jevons Paradox, which can be boiled down to the fact that increased efficiency leads to greater, not lesser consumption: because when we live in a world that prizes maximum output, it never makes sense to do any less than everything. In such a situation, efficiency means something very different from how it’s normally construed: it means great output, greater cost, and greater waste. For the people whose tasks have been made more efficient, it means either a higher work load or (for those who have been made redundant) destitution.
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