I blame content creators. The minute PewDiePie made a million, it was game over. There should’ve been a unified front from the start to reject the PewDiePie model. We didn’t see it for what it really was. The internet was always going to get taken over by profit-driven motives. The only way to stop that would’ve been making the internet a hostile place for people chasing profits.
Think about the timeline. Profit focus leads to ads and data collection. That leads to political groups using that data to run research and push propaganda. Corporations are gonna do what they do. Blame isn’t a light switch—it’s a pie chart. And if we don’t start naming the villain, we’re going to lose the next space too. Whatever space we think is ours. We have to stay sharp when the profit seekers show up, even if it’s just some cool comic book guy trying to sell a few books. They all end up in the same place.
Any space created by hackers and nerds should create a new religion of sorts with principals and values to prevent another take over of whatever space they create in the future.
Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.
In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.
But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.
And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.
But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.
I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.
So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.
I blame content creators. The minute PewDiePie made a million, it was game over. There should’ve been a unified front from the start to reject the PewDiePie model. We didn’t see it for what it really was. The internet was always going to get taken over by profit-driven motives. The only way to stop that would’ve been making the internet a hostile place for people chasing profits.
Think about the timeline. Profit focus leads to ads and data collection. That leads to political groups using that data to run research and push propaganda. Corporations are gonna do what they do. Blame isn’t a light switch—it’s a pie chart. And if we don’t start naming the villain, we’re going to lose the next space too. Whatever space we think is ours. We have to stay sharp when the profit seekers show up, even if it’s just some cool comic book guy trying to sell a few books. They all end up in the same place.
Any space created by hackers and nerds should create a new religion of sorts with principals and values to prevent another take over of whatever space they create in the future.
Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.
In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.
But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.
And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.
But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.
I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.
So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.