There is Too Much Art to Consume It All

So I have a counterclaim that exists today - Deviantart.

Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that.

On that, I'm already following nearly one thousand artists. I get probably 1 - 2 thousand pieces of art every month in my inbox.

A lot of these artists are actually living off their creations. Over time my standards had to rise because there are just so many people drawing. That doesn't even touch the writers on fanfiction.net or the thousands of sites dedicated to hand crafted continuities that are hundreds of thousands of pages long. Nowadays I really only follow people on Deviantart who consistently do beautiful full color ultra high resolution art pieces that would have probably bowled a king over half a milennia ago.

And I'm getting thousands of them a month, for free.

Because a lot of those creators are not living off their creations. They are wasting amazing potential flipping burgers at McDonalds because I don't have the money to fund them all. I've probably spent $100 this year on commissions so far, but I do not have nearly enough income to subsidize the (probably) 800 or so artists I follow who are stuck in bottom feeding jobs to survive.

But that is only bad for the 200 making a living off of it.

You see, the problem with a creative economy (beyond the CGP Grey robots will do it) is that a lot of people are creative, and while very few people are good at it, there are a lot of people. Just on this random website that pales in comparison of scale to premiere web ventures HN talks about all the time (of course most folks on here would love to be as successful as DA) is that you can meet everyones creative needs and desires with significantly fewer than the entirety of the population. Our current economy is satiating our entertainment desires to match whatever amount of money we are socially willing to impart to the business today, and we will only get poorer and less capable to fund entertainers of all forms (artists, writers, animators, comedians, etc) in the future as all our other jobs dry up and we lose all our income.

And then there are all those volunteers.

Today, they live off menial labor jobs. Tomorrow, when the jobs don't exist, they will try to make a living off the creativity when there is nothing left, but it cannot be enough. It is not enough today when wealth inequality is where it is at, it will never be enough tomorrow when it is even more random to find a patron with wealth to fund you - you are basically praying an aristocrat blesses you with prosperity in that world.

But they still give all of it away for free. Fundamentally I'm amazed people even spend money on entertainment at all, because I really do not - I have basically stopped watching film, because I don't see the opportunity cost of moving pictures as being worth it over the millions good of works of art and comics I have not seen yet. Music? There are millions of free tracks that could last me a lifetime on top of the collection I amassed before around 2010 of paid music that would last a lifetime. There are more fantastic free stories told than seconds left in my life to consume them all, and more are made every day.

And this is all in the infancy of the Internet. It has existed as a thing for only about twenty years where creative people could impart entertainment upon us through it. And its adoption grows every year. So the next ten years will not generate 50% more entertainment, it will probably generate magnitudes more, and we already have more than enough for a lifetime.

I mean, look at youtube. 300 hours of video every minute. It only .01% of all youtube content is great, then you are still behind spending this minute reading this sentence than watching that minute of great youtube content.

My point is the cat is out of the bag, and the economics would have never supported the cat in the bag in the first place. Art, music, video, even free (freedom and freeware) games, are all available en masse, at such scale that you cannot ever fathom to consume all we have today. There is no way we can create an economy around creating more of this stuff, because the Internet solves a long run problem that enabled the old world TV and radio industries of yesteryear - seamless persistence. All this data is going to be with us forever, always at our fingertips. No cumbersome recording hardware needed to preserve our entertainment, it is perpetually eternal thanks to the Internet Archive at the least. We can only add more from here on out, but until we achieve immortality we will only have so much any one person can possibly consume. And its not like that person is going to have any money to pay for it, if you have a creative economy, where the status quo is free, and all the other jobs evaporate.