Sex and the State • 32 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
- Lowering the cost of making and sharing media didn’t produce a creative golden age; instead it concentrated attention on a few winners, made mainstream culture more repetitive, and harmed trust in institutions.
- Automating discovery with AI isn’t a guaranteed fix—replacing human gatekeepers with profit-driven algorithms can repeat the internet’s problems and worsen content quality and polarization.
- Funding models matter: historically profitable intermediaries underwrote risky, less-commercial art and journalism, so if AI generates large profits we should funnel some of that money to human curators and to projects that aren’t immediately profitable.