One answer to the mystery of declining quality might be buried in my own experiences this week. I'm writing multiple pieces for a man who is quickly becoming big in the tech world. He started out as a decent personality that people trusted and he probably did pretty good work. But he got bigger and more popular and now he is making a lot of money, and he wants to make more. He is monetizing his fan base, literally selling the people that trust him. He does this by charging companies to promote their products to his large network of fans. He can do this because he promoted products before, the difference being that they were products that he actually liked and believed in.
I'm writing pieces that are basically low quality fabrications, due to the nature of the company I work for. It is easier and cheaper to pay a contracted worker like me to write rubbish from crap I research on the Internet, crap that is the work of other people. I write pieces to promote products of companies that have paid, and the pieces have to look like they were organically created by him and his affiliated bloggers, while really it is just the hawking of the product of a paying company.
The bulk of his site's articles are going to start looking like this. You are going from people writing about stuff they care about, to having a company that can mass produce these writings for cheap based on some economic process which really amounts to exploitation. So the quality of the articles are going to decline and this guy is going to get very rich. This partially has to do with the amoral nature of money too, and its tendency to become decoupled from the communities it gains legitimacy from, but that's another issue altogether.
This might seem a little confusing because I'm being very careful to be vague about the operations of my job, because it is the only thing bringing in money. But there is a general principle to be taken from all of this.
You see things like this happening all of the time. Some institution or business is started by an individual or group of people that is doing something very good that they care about, and wish to expand this good and become a little more powerful in the process. But eventually the expansion runs away from them and their operation takes on a life of its own. Awareness shifts from the good and the community to their own persons and their power as derived from this operation. The original mission declines in quality in proportion to the growing power of whomever is benefited by the operations of the mission.
In many cultures, the emphasis on the individual and the power of the individual over the good of the community is what evil actually looks like. This is the essence of Satanism. The funny thing is that we as a culture have adopted wholesale this ethos.
It is necessary to get to a point where we can jettison these values and stop this kind of thing from happening, because it is happening everywhere with everything. For many of us, it is all we know about how to live.And it is ruining everything.
