But what if I want a faster horse?

The "faster horses" comment is unfortunate, both because Henry Ford was a huge Nazi and because it's a dramatically wrong idea of what people actually wanted that only makes sense if you're already so car-brained[0] to think that the only alternative to a car is a horse. At least in cities, you had trains, trams, and omnibuses; not to mention walking was also an option.

There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into car-dependent suburban prisons.

Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.

[0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class solidarity and durable political movements against large business interests.

[1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had almost everything, because physical media has really robust consumer protections?

[2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait until I talk about AI.