When I was growing up I loved watching MTV. I would anxiously await a World Premiere Video from just about any band or artist. It was amazing, this youth, urban culture sent straight to my young brain that resides inside my body that lived in rural Cowtown USA. Then MTV started to change. It began with the game shows, then the talk shows, then finally the reality shows. I guess there wasn’t enough money to be made in just showing videos.

When I was older and started working in the cable TV business I was able to get a Cable Box for free for my house. The box got all the channels that we offered. I was fascinated by all the above-and-beyond channels that I would normally have to subscribe to. One of these channels was called VH1 Classics. They showed nothing but videos. No shows, not even commercials. It was beautiful. They showed all the old videos that I grew up with. More importantly they showed a lot of heavy metal videos for songs I knew but have never seen a video for. This was before YouTube was the video juggernaut we know today. VH1 Classics had me hooked.

Eventually VH1 Classics started to change. It started showing commercials. Then it started showing hosted video shows. Finally it turned into nothing more than an overflow channel for other Viacom-owned properties (MTV, VH1, etc.). It was part of the sad truth about growing up, which is Everything You Love Will Be Monetized.

It wasn’t enough that I liked videos on MTV. If you pay for a cable subscription then you’re already subsidizing MTVs existence. But then they started showing commercials, to make more money. Then they started showing me stuff that they wanted me to see, not what I wanted to see. Ah, but for a small additional monthly fee I could subscribe to VH1 classics to see what I originally paid MTV to see. So videos, like any other service or product, will eventually raise the cost to me to find my pain-point: They point at which, if they charged just one dollar more, I would leave. They were out to extract maximum value.

I get it. I get what they’re doing and why they do it. I try to extract (near) maximum value for my labor from my employer. I love the USA, and to love our country it’s easier to love capitalism too. So I have nothing against capitalism. It’s great, it lifts people out of poverty, it creates labor saving devices and new technologies and all that jazz. I just remember stuff like watching videos and I look back on the transition from young doe-eyed idealist into world-weary realist.

This is why my son plays baseball for an organized team that travels to tournaments to play other organized teams. He loves baseball, and I love to watch him play baseball. It’s not enough to just play Little League. There is additional league above and beyond this in which he can also play, for a small fee. Everything You Love Will Be Monetized.

My son doesn’t care about economics. We’ll, he’s 12. He does care about it but not consciously, yet. He’s bright though. He will put all the pieces together as he gets older. But for now he just wants to play ball. And he’s good enough to play with the travel ball team, so he’s got that going for him. I suppose it would be different if, instead of anyone being able to pay for VH1 Classics, that we had to audition to prove our worthiness to watch the channel.

I’m glad that travel ball exists for him as an option to play. But I also loved my time helping out with his Little League team, at every practice and every game. I was surrounded by kids who were way less privileged than my son. For some of these kids Little League was maybe the only positive activity in their life. I had one kid tell me during a game that his mom was out-of-town and he had nothing to eat. I told my wife and by the end of that game she had showed up with a basket of food for this kid to take home. I don’t think this situation is going to pop up during a travel ball game.