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.
