In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips
&gt;The 21st century’s digital dazzle conceals age-old tricks. In keeping with the ways that charity has always been used to smooth over questions of fairness and exploitation, the new vogue for ad hoc donations seems designed to distract us from a handful of tech players getting ever-more wealthy, while the people on their platforms who would like to enrich the culture with something more substantial than cat videos are living increasingly impossible lives.<p>I think this article tries to make a complex problem into &quot;fair&#x2F;unfair&quot; situation.<p>In my point of view, the &quot;problem&quot; is globalization itself. Everyone thought it would be the most fair thing ever. We would have access to more people and more things that were made all over the world, and we would see a boom of diversity. In reality globalization simply makes large players even larger, funneling the majority of the wealth and resources to few players.<p>That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s a handful of tech players getting-ever more wealthy. Everything compounds on a global scale, they can run businesses at loss, have access to unlimited capital, hoard every competitor, making them even more bloated and large.<p>Yet this is funny because within the artists industry, the exact same thing is happening. The big popular artists are getting most of the attention&#x2F;wealth, probably at a scale never seen before. The Beatles have never reached so many people, and that&#x27;s taking away from other artists - so it&#x27;s not just cat videos. Why aren&#x27;t artists complaining that other artists are taking away from them? At least radios had to manage a pool of time, now people can listen to the same artists, everyday, in a loop.<p>Should popular artists have a pool of time that gets empty after so many streams?<p>Which brings me to the point of: reach. Just because you can reach more people doesn&#x27;t mean that everyone would have the interest&#x2F;attention to invest their time to listen to music. Maybe the cat videos time was spent watching commercials in the 90&#x27;s, or reading through a SEARS catalog in the 70&#x27;s. The difference is that now it&#x27;s funneled to few media companies.<p>So the question shouldn&#x27;t be if it&#x27;s offensive to have tip jars that help struggling artists, or if watching cat videos is culture decay... maybe should be, is globalization good for culture? Is globalization a fair and balanced system?