Vincent Kinian

"all of their forebears were created to be convenient abstractions which simplified the complex work of existing in human society, not as an ideal form we are trying to mold human behavior around."

This really is the motto of our era, isn't it? Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it any conceivable alternative to capitalism, the systems that govern us have become increasingly untethered from any need for popular support. At the same time, the various components which constitute capitalism can't survive without continual mass adoption, especially as time goes on, so all the big players have chosen to maintain that level of adoption by either (depends on your perspective) exploiting our resignation to the status quo or by actively demanding our fealty. To cite a few examples, we've got:

• Marvel fans demanding we lower our standards to accept these films really are as rewarding as Disney's advertising machine tells us they are.
• The technological space in general - NFTs and crypto if you want specific examples - trying to convince us their technologies are inevitable because, lacking any real use beyond primitive accumulation, that's the only way people will ever adopt them. Take that logic far enough, and it very quickly lapses into fascist boot-licking.
• The Democrats treating their own constituents as petulant children whenever the latter ask for any of the progressive programs they explicitly ran on enacting. "The long arc of history bends toward justice, so long as you ignore the Republicans routinely bending it at sharp right angles toward injustice."

No fancy quote or anything from this article. Just pretend this link to it is an actual quote or something; I dunno.

Anyway, to go against the thesis laid out therein (which isn't to say I disagree with the article; just that I have a different perspective on it), I see graphics cards as a kind of status symbol more than anything. You pay a high premium for the best graphics because so few people can access (afford) them. As soon as that level of graphic fidelity becomes widespread, its appeal falls to the wayside, forcing graphics card manufacturers to come up with another card that would break some other poor schmuck's wallet, but not ours. In a way, the graphics card's transition to a crypto-generating technology was perfectly natural: both uses exploit an otherwise-unfulfillable desire for social mobility.