• j4k3@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I think a lot of that is a product of the bottleneck of information and media back then. People went to the movies because there wasn’t as much to do or sources of information. There were not a dozen films competing for your patronage in the same way as in more recent times. The world moved more conservatively slowly where calculating risk was very different. Also ratings were kinda a new and less relevant thing I think, but that was long before I was ever born.

    The California culture of risk with enormous funds and technology at the time was also huge and had a big impact on SW that was forging that bleeding edge and melding the old with the new. We’re in an upheaval era of promise right now too, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive and complicated than it was in the 1970’s-1980’s. Even adjusting for inflation there is no comparison between the cost of a silicon chip fab and edge technology between then and now. The price of novel innovation has changed from someone adapting a new idea to someone contracting established firms.

    The old ways cost enormous labor. It is fine and manageable when that cost is normalized across society in the cost of living. It is impossible to return to that paradigm once that normalization is lost. Society would collapse if the necessary changes were made to make mass labor viable at the scales of the past. So, the risk changes and so must the media.