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0 points9dev1y ago0 comments

The point, though, is the 90% are having a disastrous impact on the environment, despite being fundamentally irrelevant and thus wasteful.

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ben_w1y ago

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.

The people tend to disagree.

9devOP1y ago

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

ben_w1y ago

Sounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".

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ben_w1y ago

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

The people tend to disagree.

9devOP1y ago

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

ben_w1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse