People are given a choice on what they eat as well and many also eat junk food, despite it largely being agreed upon that junk food is not good for you.

Both cheap entertainment and junk food cede your autonomy to large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.

This is purely subjective, but I believe that the path to personal fulfillment does not involve watching TV and playing video games in your spare time. I say this as someone who was addicted to video games and played 40 hours a week in addition to a full time job.

When someone says “No matter who wins, we lose” they are implying that we are all beholden to corporations who will inevitably screw us, but that does not have to be the case. You can choose not to participate.

I disagree with your premise that your non-preferred form of entertainment is equivalent to eating junk food.

I’m sorry that you were addicted to playing video games (truly) but I think your past experience is preventing you from thinking rationally about this.

People can find fulfillment from many different things, including the ones that you personally don’t find fulfilling. One's fulfillment is also irrelevant with respect to whether the product they are consuming was designed by a corporation to extract maximum profits (though I sympathize with your anti-corporate stance, despite the fact I find this point of yours to be irrational).

You admitted your view was subjective, yet you are prescribing it as a general view that applies to everyone which is both elitist and dissonant.

As someone who has begun to fall into the "Machine Zone"[1] with gaming and stream watching (and trying to get back out) I'm feeling many of the things you're describing.

I struggle with defining the line for myself because a lot of my own hobbies and goals are creative - making music, building a video game, performing improv comedy. And those things are naturally in want of an audience.

Does it mean that I'm part of the problem in wanting to create entertainment, because I'm essentially asking an audience to indulge in the "junk food" that I create? I don't know.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on that question because your ideas seem to be well-articulated. My current thinking is that there is a distinction between:

- "So good" and "So good I could watch it for hours"

- "The artistic content" and "The platform moderating your access to it"

- "Pro-social" and "Anti-social" encouragement / culture of various media (the medium is the message, etc).

Making good quality, non-addictive, pro-social art, independently seems to be an ideal outcome, but then your art - while also being extremely expensive to create and distribute - is in competition with highly visible, well-established, strongly addictive... McDonald's franchises.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design

>large corporations whose main goal is to make you addicted to their product and extract the maximal amount of money.

I wasted thousands of hours in the 1990s reading Usenet. The part of Usenet I used (i.e., not the binary newsgroups) never made anyone any money and was never intended to make money by the people who built and administered it.

The software I used to read Usenet, namely Wayne Davison's trn, was likewise never intended to make any money: since its license had a clause prohibiting commercial use, it technically did not qualify as open-source software, but it was freely redistributable, i.e., basically given away (along with its source code).

But trn was designed for addiction. Hitting the space key always brought up a new screenful of text. Whenever I got bored with a post, the n key would skip the rest of the post and show me the first screenful of the next post. Once I'd been shown all the posts in one group, trn would automatically start showing me the next group with unread messages. In summary, the path of least resistance (namely, repeatedly hitting the space key till bored, then hitting the n key) caused a continuous "waterfall" or firehose of text to scroll by on the screen.

Moreover, it was difficult to use trn reflectively: e.g., if I found myself returning in my thoughts to a screenful of text I saw a minute ago, there was a good chance that there was no practical way for me put that earlier screenful back on the screen unless I was still reading the post in which the desired screenful occurred, in which cause I could scroll backward using the b key. (The early web, when the back button still reliably returned the user to the previous page, was a big improvement over trn in its support for reflective use.)

Point is that we should put the blame for the addictiveness of modern life on the right cause: not large corporations, not even the profit motive, but rather the technological progress that has accumulated over the centuries, which enables the creation and the delivery at an affordable price to the average person of experiences that are much more potent or pleasurable than anything available to an average person in the environment in which we evolved.

Yes, sex and eating good food with interesting people were always potent experiences for people, but in past centuries, it took a lot of effort, expense or risk to obtain those experiences in contrast to the ease, cost-efficiency and safety with which potent experiences can be arranged on the internet. And if a person carries around a smartphone, these cheap easy-to-arrange safe potent experiences are available at almost every waking moment.

For me the Usenet of the 1990s was a potent experience because I was strongly motivated by curiosity and learning. (1990s Usenet was full of conversations between very smart people.) Comedian and talk-show host Arsenio Hall joked in the 1990s that the internet was cocaine for smart people. This was true even before the US government lifted (in 1993 IIRC) the ban on using the US internet backbone for any commercial purpose.