We’re perilously close to the point where They’re producing television faster than I can watch it. Meaning, if I just sat down tonight and started watching TV, and dedicated all my spare time to that enterprise, then we’d be just about even. Maybe I’d creep slowly ahead, and have to fill an occasional pair of hours with re-runs of Beastmaster, which, according to Shane’s Theorem [1], is always playing on some cable station.
I’m used to this idea from my reading life, although not as used to it as you might think, since until I was 19 the only books I read were fantasy and sci-fi, which might explain some things about me. By a certain point in my adolescence, considering that the set of possible books was whatever was available for sale at B. Dalton’s at Northtown, I had read nearly everything in the reachable universe. As new books would appear in the tiny B. Dalton sci-fi section, I would read them, too.
Anyway, right now the television universe is about the size of the B. Dalton sci-fi section, which sounds like a little but is actually a lot, considering the metrics given above. And it’s speeding up. And what’s most surprising is that the speedup is due not just to idiotic shit like that Honey Boo Boo show — my niece and I watched a few clips from it last night, after which I suffered a tiny stroke — but from stuff that’s really worth watching, the television equivalent of fiction that changes the way you think about stuff.
Which means we’re basically on the cusp of the end of scarcity, measured using the lowest common denominator. Meaning, there’s almost something worth seeing available at all times. In other words, you can become intellectually and emotionally enriched while making no mental effort whatever, while you mash cheetos into your hole. This isn’t like watching linear algebra videos online, is what I’m saying; or learning to speak Mandarin. This is like going to an Adam Sandler movie and coming away with Hamlet.
If anyone actually read this fucking blog they would no doubt take exception to this analogy, and pepper me with outrage; or else not bother being outraged because they’d be convinced I’m talking out my ass again. But believe me when I say that it’s an argument I’m prepared to have.
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[1] I just decided to give this thing a name since I refer to it all the time, and since it seems increasingly clear that I’ll never have anything more important named after me, I chose to bestow my name on this.
It may be worth noting that, though I am christening this after myself, it is actually not my first theoretical contribution to science, since I proposed the Donut Theorem in 1990, and the Donut Corrolary in 1991, and the Tang Hypothesis in 1992. You can probably find the papers on JSTOR.