I was thinking about the Great Serpent Mound (also Stonehenge, etc) and the fact that so much human effort was involved that it's actually the labor that makes it really special. We know that people cared about this so much, it had so much importance to them for whatever reason, they worked and worried and suffered over it for long enough to make it happen. That's what makes it special. If the guy with a digger did it in a month it would just be a curiosity but not a monument.

It also reminds me of a game studio I worked at that hired an exec from, I don't know, Frito-Lay or some shit. He took it as a point of pride that he had no idea how games were made because he believed it didn't matter and having any sort of romantic notions about art would get in the way of the business of moving product, because anything but the fetishization of generic units was an affectation that true visionaries (like him) must discard. These are the people who can't understand why we can't be bothered to pay for AI slop.

Anyway that studio's reputation now stands in ruins.