I think you'd be surprised at the degree to which the "little people" did experience live entertainment before the advent of mass market recordings. Festivals, traveling troubadours, other traveling performers...

Yeah, I guess all those groundlings standing around eating oranges and laughing at the dirty jokes at the Globe Theater in Shakespeare's day just didn't exist in this guy's universe.

I think this misses the point that _everyone_ used to sing and tell stories. What do you all think families did in the winter around a fire? Where do "folk tales" come from? It's as if you think joy in sharing stories and music is restricted to a monetary transaction. Sure, some people were better story tellers than others, or more beautiful singers than others, but that gave reason for communities to exist, to share food and company; not for money, but because once you have shelter and food, what more than that do you really need? And also, without community, can you even have shelter and food? The vast majority of humans that have lived, let's say since spoken language developed, have shared stories and music as a gift. It wasn't until very recently (relatively) that sharing these things became transactional.

Sorry that was a ramble, please take no offense.

> more than a few times in their life

Whereas now we have the complete opposite problem, we're inundated by (much) lesser variants of these things to the point of saturation, addiction, and emotional depletion. I'm not sure either one of the extremes is particularly desirable, nor how acknowledging issues that mass-market consumerist societies currently visibly suffer from makes one a Luddite.

It always amuses me when people on Hacker News use Luddite in the pejorative "caveman" sense of the word instead of the actual "skeptical of the societal drawbacks of advancing technology" sense, especially since people on this site like you effect an air of being so much smarter than the average pleb.