An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week is that, if we want to get away from monopolies and surveillance economies, we might need to rethink the assumption that everything on the internet should be free.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that maybe we just can't have something for nothing.
I mean even from a leftist perspective, it's just obvious that labor has to be paid a fair wage, and so if a product isn't charging the nominal audience, that money has to come from somewhere.
So increasingly, I've just been trying to actually just pony up for the little guys. I bought Cohost Plus because I want to keep this site going. I'm several years in of a Fastmail subscription I've been very happy with.
I even got a Kagi subscription. I figure paid search makes as much sense as paid anything else, especially when the alternative is a massive spy operation on a universal scale, and DDG is just Bing in a funny hat anyway.
The irony that Stewart Brand said "information wants to be free" in 1984 now feels particularly thick here in 2023. The naivete of that technolibertarian set is what got us into this mess, and I think we may need to radically revisit our understanding of the price of information if we want to build a less exploitative internet.
I think an important addition to this comment is that we are already paying for various forms of social media and internet, its just through our data. We don't value it, because unlike labor , time, or money, having someone else take it doesn't hurt us directly.
However, when the only leverage we have over big platforms/corps is withdrawing our data and potential ad sales, the actual worth of customers individually is lessened. Sure, they can sell a few less ads, but when its more important to have a massive pile of data and MDUs (monthly daily users), people quietly quitting matters less.
In a capitalistic sense, its harder to vote with your wallet if your wallet doesn't even need to vote for the company to make money, and if you pay for a service, its easier to make your voice heard by not paying for it. See: WotC not really caring for people being upset, but getting rather upset when people stopped paying for a monthly service in protest.
