And the more you resist holistic thinking the longer the time it can take for that true cost calculation to take place. As in, what good does it do to continually make things cheaper when, as demanded by cold considerations of cost, you either can't pay human workers very much for their labor at all, or you simply don't use them any more in the first place?
Thus, with everything else in life they have to pay for, and for which profit to somebody else is expected, discretionary spending is going to continue to spiral downward, because human skill as competitive commodity can't keep up.
Eventually, one supposes, the only hard copy output as commodity will be as items for the upper middle class, and the rich. The rest of us will be forced to make due with subsidized food concentrates, and VR. Which is, by the way, the basis of the dystopia my one work of fiction depicted in "The Light Of Creation."
In that story a bioelectric matrix, to do digital to nerve pulse translation, was developed that could be grafted to the spinal column, thus making it possible to do true plug in VR, only without having to plug anything in at all; accessed instead merely by laying on a properly configured bed, or reclined chair; and in this case that was limited very specifically to the one, completely free, VR internet that people got to join into, with unparalleled sensory fidelity. "America Net" it was called, and it was maintained, with a wide range of entertainments, and distractions, by one of the surviving corporate dynasties now ruling America. A net completely cut off from what was going on in the rest of the world of course, and how bad things had gotten there now that we were living "Fortress America" physically and informationally.
The point here, long term, being that this kind of concentration is quite unlikely to turn out well for the rest of us. Quite unlikely indeed.
JEFF BEZOS WILL CRUSH YOU
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