{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "So as far as I'm told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/2193057751/", "html": "<p>So as far as I&rsquo;m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are</p>\n<ul><li>Women&rsquo;s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics</li>\n<li>Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever</li>\n<li>Recapping television shows</li>\n</ul><p>(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)</p>\n<p>Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it&rsquo;s a lot of other posts.</p>\n<p>What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don&rsquo;t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe &lsquo;cause it&rsquo;s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.</p>\n<p>But isn&rsquo;t that weird?</p>\n<p>That we&rsquo;ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we&rsquo;ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?</p>\n<p>Maybe it&rsquo;ll turn out like book reviews were from the '50s-'90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn&rsquo;t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.</p>\n<p>Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.</p>\n<p>And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol&rsquo;s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.</p>\n<p>And ISN&rsquo;T THAT WEIRD.</p>"}