My internal picture of Schillerian Spieltrieb is basically a bunch of 1960s pie-in-the-sky Woodstock hippies making art, music, and free love all day in a post-work, self-governing society. The OP is juxtaposing this utopic vision of games and play against the reality of the dystopic, positivist, Skinner's box-style internet spawned by Zuckerberg/Schmidt/Bezos that is currently in the process of devouring us all.
Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world.
Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings.
This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man.
Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world.
Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings.
This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man.
Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/