70 karma · joined December 6, 2024
What I imagine the incentive is is not the ability to censor the media, but to have the media on record of who posts it and who engages with it and maintain that ledger. When people get banned and slandered for denouncing a genocide, it becomes harder and harder to call this stuff "low-IQ conspiracy slop".
There is also something to be said about today's unchecked, underutilized anxiety that one feels when sitting doing absolutely nothing. There has been an unending discussion about the causes of this, but I tend to align with the belief that since our current world doesn't provide many dangers for us to genuinely cause anxiety, our brain freaks out and finds less dire avenues to trigger it.
I see it as an inflation of speculative worth of these companies. The value they are providing can in no way be proportional to the rate of growth of their stock. It is just a circulation of their own money being passed through each of those companies' services, and not anything of worth to the consumer.
There used to be a reason to have a 5.1 surround system, because that's how the movies were supposed to be enjoyed. There used to be a reason to engineer your home "soundstage" because that's how the music was mixed and optimally appreciated.
I don't think the bar of entry being money is truly the reason, rather that people have become much more passive consumers of media, and the producers have recognized that and absolutely enshittified their products.
As for the cheap speakers = cinematic experience, watch Interstellar with 5.1, then with the soundbar and tell me how equal the experience is.